Haileab Hilafu

Haileab Hilafu is an Associate Professor and James & Connie Vavalides Faculty Fellow in Business Analytics and Statistics at the University of Tennessee's Haslam College of Business. With a PhD from the University of Georgia, his research integrates causal inference, statistical learning, and dimension reduction methods, applied to healthcare, retail, and environmental science.

Research areas include: causal inference in hospital operations, machine learning for environmental hot-spot detection, high-dimensional regression, and cross-cultural retail analytics. Applications span healthcare quality improvement (readmission risk, surgical outcomes), precision agriculture (nitrous oxide prediction), and supply chain management.

Publications bridge statistical methodology (sufficient dimension reduction, sparse regression) with domain applications in healthcare operations, environmental science, and retail analytics. Recent work emphasizes machine learning integration in empirical studies.

Awards:

• ASCC Award (2022)
• MSBA Teaching Award (2018)
• Best Senior Student, UGA Statistics (2014)
• Teaching Assistant Award (2012)