Rachel CummingsView profile
Associate Professor
Rachel Cummings is an Associate Professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research (IEOR) at Columbia University, with a courtesy appointment in the Department of Computer Science. She serves as Co-chair of the Cybersecurity Research Center at Columbia’s Data Science Institute. Previously, she was faculty at Georgia Tech’s School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE), holding a courtesy appointment in Computer Science. She holds a Ph.D. in Computing and Mathematical Sciences from Caltech, with research visits at UPenn, Hebrew University, Microsoft Research, and the Simons Institute. Her research focuses on differential privacy, integrating tools from machine learning, algorithm design, economics, optimization, statistics, HCI, usable security, and public policy. She emphasizes practical applications of theoretical privacy-preserving methods. Key roles include Managing Editor for the Journal of Privacy and Confidentiality , service on the ACM U.S. Technology Policy Council, IEEE Standards Association, and Future of Privacy Forum’s Advisory Board. She has advised on the U.S. Census Bureau’s Scientific Advisory Council and served as a Fellow at the Center for Democracy & Technology. Recent work includes papers on privacy elasticity, synthetic control methods, and differential privacy under class imbalance. Her awards include NSF CAREER, DARPA Young Faculty Award, and Best Paper recognitions at DISC, CCS, and SaTML. She actively chairs conferences (e.g., DEF CON Crypto) and mentors students like Tingting Ou (PhD 2025) and Peihan Liu (PhD 2024–present). Her lab explores privacy-preserving technologies, policy implications, and interdisciplinary collaborations.






