Babak Shahbaba

Professor Babak Shahbaba is a Professor of Statistics at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), affiliated with the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences. He serves as Director of the UCI Data Science Institute, leading initiatives in interdisciplinary data science education and research. His expertise spans Bayesian statistics, scalable computational methods, and applications in neuroscience, genomics, and healthcare.

Education:

• Ph.D., University of Toronto (2007)

Research Interests:

• Bayesian nonparametric methods for complex data
• Scalable algorithms for large-scale biological studies
• Interdisciplinary collaborations between statistics and neuroscience
• Circadian rhythm modeling using transcriptomic data
• Machine learning applications in healthcare diagnostics

Awards & Recognition:

• American Statistical Association Fellow (2022)
• Recipient of NIH R01 Grant for neurobiological research
• 2024 ICS Awards Celebration Honoree

Advising & Grants:

• Co-developed training grants fostering neuroscientist-statistician collaborations
• Directed the Irvine Summer Institute in Biostatistics
• Principal investigator on NSF Harnessing the Data Revolution grants

Labs & Initiatives:

• Leadership in the UCI Data Science Institute
• Co-creator of the NeuroDataScience workshop series
• Founder of the SoCal Data Science Program