Rahel Jhirad is Director of Data Science at Hearst. She works in a team leveraging machine learning for ad optimization, content recommendation, and audience profiling. Before joining Hearst, she consulted with Fortune 100 companies leveraging machine learning and domain expertise to solve and address business challenges.  

Rahel has twenty years of combined sell- and buy-side experience in risk management, alternative investments, asset allocation, trading and derivatives.  She is recognized for her ability to navigate new technologies and develop new paradigms to manage a changing and challenging reality.  Rahel holds a PhD in Economics from Princeton, and MS in Mathematics from NYU.  She runs a popular meetup called Economics and Big Data.