Vasilis SyrgkanisView profile
Assistant Professor
Vasilis Syrgkanis is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Management Science and Engineering , Stanford University, with courtesy appointments in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering. He leads the Stanford Causal AI Lab and is an Associated Director of the Stanford Causal Science Center . His research spans machine learning, causal inference, econometrics, online learning, reinforcement learning, game theory/mechanism design, and algorithm design . Education PhD in Computer Science, Cornell University (advised by Eva Tardos) Diploma in EECS, National Technical University of Athens Research Focus Develops methods for causal machine learning , including courses on Applied Causal Inference and Foundations of Causal ML. Works on treatment effect estimation , instrumental variable regression , and robust policy learning under unobserved heterogeneity. Explores intersections of game theory and machine learning , particularly in auction design and strategic exploration. Scientific Contributions Proposes neural causal partial identification and adaptive instrument design frameworks. Develops doubly robust learning and minimax IV regression algorithms with theoretical guarantees. Introduces incentive-aware synthetic control and structure-agnostic causal effect estimation methods. Awards & Recognition 2023 Bodossaki Distinguished Young Scientist Award in Applied Sciences 2022 Amazon Research Award in Machine Learning Algorithms and Theory Best Paper Awards at COLT 2019, EC 2015, NeurIPS 2015, and others PhD Advisees Ravi Sojitra (MS&E, co-advised with Guido Imbens) Hui Lan (ICME) Jikai Jin (ICME) Jiyuan Tan (MS&E, co-advised with Jose Blanchet) Keertana Veeramony Chidambaram (MS&E) Contact Email: vsyrgk@stanford.edu Office: Huang Engineering Center, Room 252, Stanford, CA 94305









