Teaching

Outside of Pitt:

  • Provision and Targeting of Services for Vulnerable Populations
    MD4SG tutorial at the 21th ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC’20).
    Tutorial webpage: here.
    Co-instructor: Samuel Taggart.

  • Experimental Methods for Behavioral Science
    Course at 2018 Global School of Empirical Research Method (Medellin, Colombia).
    Co-instructor: Sarah Jacobson

    • At Pitt:

    How I teach: my approach to math is intuitive and experiential — you will be doing a lot of in-class activities. We go pretty far “under the hood” to understand how theory works but will always return to applications. We will often partner with one or more external clients. You will work extensively on a project of your choosing. Click here to see students’ topics from previous years.

    Current classes:

  • PIA 2250 Working with Public Interest Technology and Civic Data
      Year of Data and Society funded class with our multidisciplinary team from Bob Gradeck (WPRDC), Ron Idoko (ODEI), Brett Say (UHC), Eleanor Anderson (School of Education), Rayid Ghani (CMU CS), and Michael Madison (Pitt Law) in Spring 2022.

      Syllabus here.
      Year of Data and Society Poster here

  • PIA 2096: Data Visualization in R for Public Policy Capstone
    • Past classes:

  • Econ + CS Reading Group
  • PIA 2202: Behavioral Economics and Game Theory
      Sequence: basic decision theory, experiments documenting violations, behavioral alternatives to rational model. Simultaneous games, sequential games. Games of asymmetric information. Behavioral economics of poverty. Application to real world problems. Sample of students’ work: Link 1, Link 2.
      Prerequisite: None.

      PIA 2202 student projects:
      Meng Li: Adaptation of the Centipede Game to Financing Startups
      Logan Bialik: Present-biased Spending Behavior After Wage Increase
      Jinsang Jo: Designing Screening Devices for Customs Clearance
      Other examples

  • Math Camp (and the Amazing Analytics Race!)
      Sample Syllabus. Race: photos.
      This is the quantitative methods bootcamp the week before the semester, capped with a game (with real prizes) where you will be randomly paired to solve a series of clues. If you are starting your graduate career in GSPIA and have forgotten your slopes and logarithms or have never used STATA, this bootcamp is for you. Conversely, if you know what a differential equation is and crunch data for a living, this camp is NOT for you.
  • PIA 2023/3000: Intermediate Quantitative Methods
      Sample Syllabus. You will write an extensive research paper that you will present in a poster session. Several class papers have gone on to win the Taraknath Das Award or are published in Pitt Policy Journal.
      Prerequisite: Introduction to Quantitative Methods.

      PIA 2023 sample student projects:
      Poster session: photos
      1. Jeffrey Depp on patent quality
      2. Hiroaki Hamajima on voter turnout
      3. JoEllen Marsh on opioid deaths

    		•

    A sampling of the clients we work with in our classrooms:

    • ICF International Management Consulting
    • Allegheny County Department of Human Services
    • City of Pittsburgh Office of Innovation and Performance
    • Western Pennsylvania Regional Data Center
    • Three Rivers Workforce Investment Board
    • Alleghany College of Maryland
    • Glovico.org