The Public Impact Analytics Science Lab (PIAS-Lab) at Harvard, founded and directed by Soroush Saghafian, is devoted to advancing and applying the science of analytics for solving societal problems that can have public impact. The mission of the lab is to improve societal outcomes by developing, integrating, and using appropriate analytical tools in Operations Research, Machine Learning and Big Data, Decision Making, Statistics, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and related fields.

The Lab is currently mainly focusing on the healthcare sector and is collaborating with the Statistical Reinforcement Learning Lab at Harvard, the Harvard Center for Health Decision Science, the Harvard Data Science Initiative, and various other organizations, including the Mayo Clinic, the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), the Brigham and Women’s Hospital,  the Brown University's Medical School, and the Boston Medical Center.

The PIAS-LAB is hosted by the Harvard Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government (M-RCBG), which is directed by Larry Summers (President Emeritus of Harvard, former Secretary of the Treasury of the United States, and former Director of the National Economic Council) and John Haigh. The mission of M-RCBG is to advance the state of knowledge and policy analysis concerning some of society’s most challenging problems at the interface of the public and private sectors.

The PIAS-LAB has access to high computational power and extremely secure data storage clusters. Specifically, the lab uses the FAS Secure Environment (FASSE), which is a highly secure multi-tenant cluster environment at Harvard that allows access to a secure enclave for analysis of sensitive datasets. FASSE currently has 24 nodes and 48 cores per node.

NEW Open Postdoctoral Fellow Position Announcement (2023): PIAS-Lab is accepting new applications for a new Postdoctoral Fellow position.  More information can be found here.
 

PIAS-Lab Members
 

 A full list of Ph.D. students and Postdoctoral Fellows engaged in the lab activities' can be found here: Ph.D. students and Postdoctoral Fellows.

More Information about PIAS-Lab Activities
 

• Q&A with Soroush Saghafian: Big Data and Machine Learning can Usher in a New Era of Policymaking
  
  

• Watch a 5-minute video describing an example of PIAS-Lab actitivites (in colloboration with the Mayo Clinic):
  
  
   
• Interview with PolicyCast on the role of data analysis and intelligent policy design in healthcare:
  
  

  
   

  PIAS-Lab Contact Information
   

  Lab's Contact Person:

  Catherine Kearns
  Phone: 617-384-7340
  Email: catherine_kearns@hks.harvard.edu

   

  Lab's Mailing Address:

  Harvard Kennedy School
  Mailbox 37
  79 JFK Street
  Cambridge, MA 02138

   

  Lab's Twitter Account:

  @PIASLab
   

  Lab's LinkedIn Account:

  Public Impact Analytics Science Lab (PIAS-Lab) at Harvard