Ben Baumer

Ben Baumer is a Professor of Statistical & Data Sciences at Smith College, co-director of the Journalism Concentration, and an Accredited Professional Statistician™. He holds a Ph.D. in Mathematics from CUNY (2012), an M.A. from UC San Diego, and a B.A. from Wesleyan University. Previously, he served as the New York Mets' first full-time Statistical Analyst (2004–2012).

His research focuses on data science, sabermetrics, network science, and statistics education. He co-authored influential works like The Sabermetric Revolution and Modern Data Science with R. He received the Waller Education Award (2019), the ASA Significant Contributor Award (2019), and the 2016 Contemporary Baseball Analysis Award. As PI, he led a $1.2M NSF Data Science Corps grant for workforce development.

His work integrates computational and statistical methods, emphasizing reproducibility and ethics. He co-organizes the ASA Five College DataFest and develops open-source tools like infer and tidychangepoint. Teaching spans data wrangling, visualization, and predictive modeling.