Rohan Alexander
Assistant Professor, Department of Statistical Sciences and the Faculty of Information
Rohan Alexander is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Statistical Sciences and the Faculty of Information and a faculty affiliate at the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society.
Alexander’s work involves constructing new datasets in a reproducible way, drawing on methods including digitization, record matching, survey collection and web-scraping. He subsequently uses quantitative methods to analyze the large amounts of information contained in the data sets, drawing on techniques from natural language processing, machine learning and Bayesian methods. Alexander’s work is focused on individuals — which makes issues of privacy and consent of critical importance, and places the work within his broader research interest in the intersection of data and ethics. Additionally, he develops open science best practices that help enhance reproducibility and replicability, as well as understanding.
Alexander’s goal in teaching is to help students learn how to tell stories with data. He also leads a reading course Ethics and Data Science and co-founded a weekly Toronto Data Workshop in which industry and academic participants collectively consider, collate, share and disseminate best practices in the critical initial data-centric steps in any data science project.
Alexander received his PhD from the Australian National University. Before joining U of T, he held a variety of roles including at Australia’s central bank and his own start-up.