Scholar
Hamsa Bastani
Google Scholar ID: ZbUfUMoAAAAJ
Associate Professor of Operations Information and Decisions, Wharton School
Citations & Impact
Citations
2,553
H-index
17
i10-index
24
Publications
20
Co-authors
51
list available
Contact
Publications
Resume (English only)
Academic Achievements
- Publications in top venues including Nature, Management Science, Operations Research, and PNAS
- Recipient of the Wagner Prize for Excellence in Operations Research
- INFORMS Pierskalla Award for best healthcare paper
- George Nicholson Prize winner
- Multiple Wharton Teaching Excellence Awards for teaching OIDD 321: Introduction to Management Science
- Selected papers:
- - "Generative AI Without Guardrails Can Harm Learning: Evidence from High School Mathematics" (PNAS, 2025)
- - "Improving Access to Essential Medicines in Sierra Leone via Decision-Aware Machine Learning" (Revise & Resubmit, Nature)
- - "Efficient and Targeted COVID-19 Border Testing via Reinforcement Learning" (Nature, 2021)
- - "Rethinking Algorithmic Fairness for Human-AI Collaboration" (ITCS, 2024)
- - "Adaptive Clinical Trial Designs with Surrogates: When Should We Bother?" (Management Science, 2022)
- - "Unmasking Human Trafficking Risk in Commercial Sex Supply Chains with Machine Learning" (M&SOM, 2025)
Research Experience
- Associate Professor at Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
- Co-Director of Wharton Healthcare Analytics Lab
- Collaborated with Greek government on RL-based border testing for COVID-19
- Partnered with Sierra Leone government on medicine access optimization
- Led large-scale field study on generative AI tutors in high school math
- Associate Editor for Operations Research, M&SOM, and OR Letters
- Serves on Steering Committee for Penn Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics
- Member of statistics advisory committee for AHA Food is Medicine Initiative
- Serves on Workday AI Advisory Board
Background
- Associate Professor of Operations, Information, and Decisions (OID) and (secondary) Statistics and Data Science at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
- Co-Director of the Wharton Healthcare Analytics Lab
- Research focuses on novel machine learning algorithms for learning and optimization, including sequential decision-making (bandits, reinforcement learning, active learning), learning from auxiliary data (transfer learning, meta-learning, surrogates), and human–AI interfaces (interpretability, fairness)
- Recently exploring how AI systems affect and augment human behavior to design tools that help humans thrive
- Passionate about applying ML/AI to high-impact societal problems in healthcare, public policy, and education
- Collaborated with the Government of Greece to nearly double the efficacy of national border COVID-19 screening using reinforcement learning
- Worked with the Government of Sierra Leone to improve patient access to essential medicines by nearly 20% via decision-aware learning
- Co-led the first large field study deploying generative AI tutors in high school math, revealing risks of human overreliance and deskilling
- Uses field evidence from randomized controlled trials combined with theoretical models to inform human-AI collaboration design
