Dr. Cyril Rakovski, associate professor of mathematics, has been named program director for the computational and data sciences graduate program!

Rakovski attained his doctorate in biostatistics from Harvard University, where he designed novel extensions of the classical family-based test for associations. He was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California, where he worked on developing efficient methods for the analysis of complexly sampled case-control data, new statistical methods for case-control genetic association studies and DNA methylation analysis.

 

His current research interests are causal inference, high-accuracy predictive modeling, applications of AI in medicine, times series analysis, statistical genetics and nonparametric methods.

Rakovski is taking over for the previous director Dr. Hesham El-Askary who recently received the opportunity to serve as the Executive Vice President of the Egyptian Space Agency. El-Askary will be take a leave of absence for the remainder of the academic year to serve in this new role.

In an email to faculty, Dean Michael Ibba shared, “I would like to express my gratitude to Hesham for everything he has done as the director over many years, making it into a highly successful graduate program. The program has produced many stellar graduates, some of whom now serve as faculty at Chapman and elsewhere, while others have excelled in many other areas. His efforts with this program also played an important role in Chapman’s elevation to R2 status.”

Rakovski served as assistant director of the program last year and is looking forward to building the program further as the director.

Cover photo: Dr. Cyril Rakovski (left) working on research with Louis Ehwerhemuepha (MS ’13, Ph.D. ’15), a senior data scientist at CHOC (right)