Charles Rahal

Charles Rahal is an Associate Professor in Data Science and Informatics at the University of Oxford, with additional affiliations as an Associate Member of Nuffield College and Researcher at the Gradel Institute, New College. He serves as a Co-Investigator at the ESRC Centre for Care and sits on the Steering Group of Reproducible Research Oxford. His academic career includes previous roles as a Senior Departmental Research Lecturer at the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science and a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow.

Dr. Rahal completed his PhD in 2016 and has established himself as a prominent social science methodologist and applied social data scientist with expertise in high-dimensional econometrics. His research spans multiple domains, focusing particularly on unique Big Data origination processes and their relationship to social inequality, mobility, and stratification. He is deeply engaged in machine learning methods, civic technology, spatial and time series econometrics, model uncertainty, and scientometrics.

His recent publications reveal a strong trend toward computational social science, with significant contributions to understanding prediction limits, pandemic impacts, healthcare systems, and environmental sustainability. The articles demonstrate his interdisciplinary approach, bridging traditional social science with cutting-edge computational methods, particularly in the analysis of large-scale datasets and development of novel metrics like the InterModel Vigorish for model comparison.

Dr. Rahal is actively involved in teaching and mentoring, co-convening courses in Demographic Analysis, Life Course Research, and the Oxford Partner site of the Summer Institute in Computational Social Sciences. He has developed workshops on machine learning, command line interfaces, and LaTeX, reflecting his commitment to methodological training in social science.

He leads the Metrics and Models lab and maintains several open-source projects including the GWAS Diversity Monitor and RobustiPy. His editorial roles include Associate Editor-in-Chief at the Journal of Social Computing and Associate Editor at ACM Transactions on Social Computing, highlighting his influence in shaping computational social science methodology.