Episode 19: Kristian Lum - Lifelong curiosity and Criminal Justice Reform through data

Krisitan Lum brings a passion for statistics to bettering the world around her. Her story offers insights for each of us to become more data literate and ways to use our own curiosities and skills to build a flourishing society.

Kristian Lum is an inspiration. She is the Lead Statistician at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG), where she leads the HRDAG project on criminal justice in the United States.

At HRDAG, Kristian applies statistical and machine learning to better understand the criminal justice system and to inform its reform, one of the most dire issues confronting our society. Her work is utterly novel and fascinating and I encourage everyone to spend time with her paper “The contagious nature of imprisonment” and work to expose biases in machine learning-based predictive policing. 

Before going to HRDAG, Kristian held roles of data scientist at a small data science startup business called DataPad, Statistician at Virginia Tech, among others. She received a PhD from Duke and a BA from Rice. She is precisely the kind of person that I want providing the hard research to improve our criminal justice system. 

Kristian is an embodiment of many of the ideas that we often discuss on Origins - antidisciplinarity, the fusion of fields, using one’s skills and passions to affect change in the world. This is a conversation that I have been looking forward to for a long time.