“Do what excites you.”
Negar Kiyavash is an associate professor and Chair of Business Analytics at the College of Management of Technology of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). Born in Iran, she graduated in Electrical Engineering from the Sharif University of Technology in Teheran, after which she moved to the USA and earned her Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in 2006. She joined the same university after her graduation as an assistant professor of Industrial engineering (IE). She was promoted early to the rank of associate professor with joint appointments at IE and ECE departments and named a Willett Faculty Scholar at UIUC. Before joining EPFL in 2019, was a joint associate professor of IE and ECE departments at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Her research interests are in machine learning and statistical decision-making, with particular emphasis on network inference problems such as causal inference, database and graph de-anonymization.
She is a recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, one of the most prestigious awards in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in their fields and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Research Program Award as well as the Illinois College of Engineering Dean’s Award for Excellence in Research. Adapted from Negar Kiyavash - EPFL
Keywords: Mathematics, Information Theory, Stochastics, Statistics, Causal Inference
Lausanne – October 13th, 2022
How did you (decide to) become a scientist? When I was young, I loved all my mathematics courses and enjoyed so much solving math problems. I was fortunate to have had wonderful teachers. I went on to study engineering for my undergraduate and although I liked it, I noticed that I preferred more abstract topics and mathematics. So, when I went to graduate school, I made sure to study the mathematical sides of engineering. I worked on information theory and stochastics. That’s my passion: I love applied math, especially statistics.
What is your drive and excitement in science and in doing what you do now? I love to do research. There are so many questions that for a long time have preoccupied us. Some of them are quite philosophical. I work on causality. For centuries people have cared about how various phenomena influence each other; causation is the question of “why” in science. This is a question that of course excites me. It’s not just doing my own research that motivates me. I am also excited about teaching and especially working with my graduate students. These are young people who are very talented, they all have their own strengths that they bring to the group. I am now in an advisory role where I can help other young scientists realize what they dream of.
Would you have one word to give as a gift to other women and more in general to young aspiring scientists, women or men? It is passion. I think in life you should do what excites you because if you are passionate about what you’re doing, every day when you go to work it’s not work, it’s a labor of love and it’s something that excites you and you’re happy about it. And if science is what you are passionate about, that is great, because you know your passion is something that would end up helping other people as well.
Science is my passion… in your mother tongue. انش پژوهشی شور منست
