Photo by Biyue Pan

Department of Statistics, University of Washington
Email: ataeb@uw.edu
CV (updated November 2025)
Google Scholar Profile






I am an assistant professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of Washington. I was a postdoctoral fellow at ETH Zürich, mentored by Peter Bühlmann. I obtained my PhD in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Caltech, mentored by Venkat Chandrasekaran.

My research objective is to broaden the scope of inferential methodology to new and non-standard settings. I leverage insights from statistical inference as well as fundamental concepts from discrete and continuous optimization, combinatorics, order theory, and causality.

News:
  • Co-organizing the first international New Researchers Conference INRC
         Together with E. Lila, A. Torrejon, V. Guerrero, and others. 2025.
  • New paper "Consensus Tree Estimation with False Discovery Rate Control via Posets"
         Together with M. Valdez, A. Willis, 2025.
  • New paper "Convex Mixed-Integer Programming for Causal Additive Models"
         Together with X. Zhang, N. Keret, A. Shojaie, 2025.
  • New paper "Model-oriented Graph Distances via Posets"
         Together with F.R. Guo and L. Henckel, 2025.


  • Funding: I am grateful for support by the National Science Foundation with grant DMS-2413074 (PI) and by the Royalty Research Fund at the University of Washington (PI).

    PhD students: I am currently looking for highly motivated PhD students. If you are a UW PhD student or have just been admitted, feel free to reach out to learn more and to talk about specific research ideas!

    Service for new researchers: I am passionate about giving young researchers in data science a platform to grow professionally. I am now serving as the president of the IMS New Researcher Group. I co-organized the IMS New Researchers Conference in 2024 and 2025. If you have any suggestions for how to help young researchers, please do not hesitate to email me!