Forrest W. Crawford is a senior statistician at RAND. He works with the RAND Center on AI, Security, and Technology on reducing risk from biological threats and emerging technologies. His methodological interests include probability, stochastic processes, networks/graphs, simulation, optimization, machine learning, artificial intelligence, causal inference, and modeling. His applied research work addresses problems in a broad array of scientific domains, including biomedicine, bioengineering, epidemiology, public health, national security, intelligence, human rights, and pandemic response.
Before coming to RAND, Crawford was an associate professor of biostatistics, statistics & data science, operations, and ecology & evolutionary biology at Yale University. At Yale he ran a research group dedicated to developing methodology for solving challenging inferential problems in biomedicine, infectious disease epidemiology, and public health. He has taught courses on stochastic processes, networks, computational statistics, modeling, genetics, and causal inference. He received the National Institutes of Health Director's New Innovator Award in 2016.
Crawford received his Ph.D. from UCLA.