The IEOR Department Welcomes Daniel Pirutinsky to the Faculty
The Department of Industrial Engineering & Operations Research at the University of California, Berkeley is excited to welcome Daniel Pirutinsky as a new member of the faculty for Fall 2020. Daniel will be a assistant teaching professor, who will focus primarily on educating IEOR’s growing student population, now at 450 students, the largest student body on record.
For Fall 2020, Daniel will teach INDENG 172 – Probability and Risk Analysis for Engineers as well as INDENG 242 – Applications in Data Analysis.
Daniel is just completing his PhD in Operations Research at Rutgers Business School, where his research focused on bridging the theoretical gap between provable optimal reinforcement learning algorithms of limited practical use and those with seemingly empirically good success but with weak theoretical guarantees.
Regarding his teaching philosophy, Daniel explains, “I actively seek to use the opportunities, powers, and privilege that I have been fortunate enough to receive to ensure a wide and diverse range of people have similar access. Not only do I feel that this is the ethical course of action, my personal experiences as someone with various barriers to access and a ‘non-traditional’ background, further guides my approach.
“My students have faced challenges related to balancing work, family, and school obligations, being non-native English speakers, poverty, disabilities, gender and race discrimination, and many more. I continue to attempt to make their learning experiences flexible enough to not exacerbate the serious challenges they face inside and outside of the classroom. My work is never done, and I look forward to discovering more ways in which I can enhance the learning experience for each of my students.”
Daniel has five years of experience as an educator, teaching computer science, business, and data analysis classes at the college level.
Please join the Department in welcoming Daniel to IEOR and Berkeley!