Merritt Smith
PhD Candidate
Berkeley, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolMerritt Smith is a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley with eight years of applied data science and ML experience focused on public policy and social impact. They have built large-scale models—from estimating populations across African municipalities to predictive imputation for federal surveys—and used causal inference and ML to tackle domestic violence, police misconduct, and gun violence. Merritt has bridged academia and practice through research and teaching roles at the University of Chicago and LSE, and has built production-ready anomaly detection and decision-process frameworks in compliance and public-sector settings. Comfortable coding in Python and R and translating methods for policy audiences, they combine rigorous causal thinking with engineering discipline to deliver measurable outcomes. An early maker of novel analytical pipelines, Merritt’s work often pairs machine learning with concrete institutional deployment rather than purely theoretical contributions.
8 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Information Science/Studies, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Information Science/Studies at University of California, BerkeleyBachelor of Arts (BA), Data Science and Public Policy, Bachelor of Arts (BA), Data Science and Public Policy at Tufts UniversityMaster of Science - MS, Computational Analysis and Public Policy, Master of Science - MS, Computational Analysis and Public Policy at Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago4.2/4.0, 4.2/4.0 at Pacific Collegiate SchoolLondon School of Economics and Political Science
Spanish
Stackoverflow
1reputation
345reached
0answers
1question
Github Skills (22)
simulation10
simulation-framework10
agent-based-modeling10
cellular-automata10
agent10
gis10
mesa10
agent-based-simulation10
modeling10
python9
morphological-analysis7
morphology7
knn6
imputation6
r6
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
Beau-Smit/ML_project
Apr 2021 - Sep 2021
Contributions:2 PRs, 207 pushes, 1 branch in 5 months
mmerrittsmith/mmerrittsmith.github.io
Dec 2018 - Aug 2024
M. Merritt Smith personal site
Contributions:3 PRs, 45 pushes, 3 branches in 5 years 9 months
gatsbysmithreactmerritt
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