I am a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University. My program is joint between public policy and machine learning. I am a member of the Event and Pattern Detection Laboratory, headed by Daniel Neill.

I’m originally from Evanston, Illinois, where I graduated from Evanston Township High School in 2004. I graduated from Harvard in 2008, where I majored in mathematics and computer science. At Harvard, I was on the board of the Harvard College Democrats and Harvard Hillel and I chaired the Harvard College Progressive Jewish Alliance.

I took part in Harvey Mudd’s fantastic Research Experience for Undergraduates in the summer of 2006, and I presented our work on approximation algorithms for traffic grooming (see papers). My undergraduate thesis, which began with a summer at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, was on connections between the Unique Games Conjecture and semidefinite programming-based approximation algorithms (see papers).

I moved with Jaclyn to Lausanne, Switzerland, in August 2008. While she began a PhD in international history at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva on a Fulbright Scholarship, I worked as a stagiaire (research assistant) in the Media and Design Laboratory at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) on a project called CityRank (see papers, talks). In 2009, I did more computer science research at EPFL.

In the fall of 2010, I started working in the Mortality and Burden of Disease group in the Department of Health Statistics and Information at the World Health Organization. I worked on the Global Burden of Disease project and the Nutrition Impact Model Study.

(You may be looking for the other Seth Flaxman, who graduated from Columbia in 2007, worked at the Council on Foreign Relations, and is now running TurboVote. You can find him on LinkedIn.)