Datathon Judges

Adriana Crespo-Tenorio, PhD is on a mission to connect people’s online behavior to their offline lives. As part of the Ads Research team at Facebook, her work focuses on making causal connections between digital advertising and user behaviors, as well as the interaction of digital advertising with other media. Adriana joined Facebook after working at The New York Times’s Customer Insights Group. She holds a PhD in political science from Washington University in St Louis.

Rayid Ghani serves as a Chicago Harris Senior Fellow and as Chief Data Scientist for the Computation Institute’s Urban Center for Computation and Data. As Chief Data Scientist, Ghani will help analyze city data and build complex computer models that simulate the impact of policy decisions and urban development. In addition, he will work with Chicago Harris on an array of efforts, including the launch of a new Master’s degree program in data-driven policymaking to be offered jointly with the Department of Computer Science, and a conference on urban technology innovation in partnership with the City of Chicago.

Prior to joining the University of Chicago, Ghani was chief scientist of the highly regarded Obama for America data analytics team.  During the 2012 campaign season, Ghani’s team applied advanced data-mining and machine-learning methods to create new tools for fundraising, voter turnout, advertising and campaign strategy.  Now, working with the Computation Institute and the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, Ghani hopes to adapt those methods to address challenges in areas such as education, public safety and health care.

Kate Grossman spent nearly 20 years as a print reporter and opinion writer before joining the Institute of Politics as a director in fall 2015. Most recently, Grossman was deputy editorial page editor at the Chicago Sun-Times, writing editorials on education, state and local politics, the Illinois state budget as well as overseeing the paper’s political endorsements. She also worked as a metro reporter at the Sun-Times, covering schools and public housing, and at the Associated Press, The Providence Journal and ABC 20/20. She is a two-time winner of the national Education Writers Association top opinion writing award for editorials on the Chicago Public Schools and a winner of the Studs Terkel Award for coverage of Chicago's diverse communities. She has an undergraduate history degree from Cornell and two masters, in public policy and journalism, from Columbia University

Solomon Messing is director of Data Labs at Pew Research Center, which uses innovations in computational methods and machine learning to study key social and political questions. Prior to joining the Center, Messing worked as a data scientist at Facebook and data analyst at Science Applications International Corporation. He completed a doctorate in communication and master’s in statistics at Stanford University and also holds a master’s in international affairs and management from UC San Diego and a bachelor’s in political science from UC Santa Barbara.