Colleen Chan

I am a research scientist at Netflix Research, where I work on reward modeling and model evaluation and alignment for the homepage recommendation system.

I received my Ph.D. in Statistics and Data Science at Yale University in 2024, advised by Jas Sekhon. My research interests are application-driven and span generative AI, causal machine learning, and interpretability. Before Yale, I completed my undergraduate work in probability and statistics, economics, and computer science at UC San Diego in 2018.

colleenc@netflix.com

Research

Peer-Reviewed Publications and Preprints

Working Papers

Improving Estimation of Total Effects in Meta-Analysis.
Colleen Chan, Tonatiuh Barrientos Gutierrez, Rodrigo Zepeda-Tello, Dalia Camacho García Formentí, Rodrigo Barran, Rosana Torres Alvarez, Dalia Stern-Solodkin, Donna Spiegelman.
Under Review, 2022+.

Ph.D. Dissertation

Interpretable Machine Learning and Causal Inference in Medicine and Public Health, Yale University, 2024.

Experience

Past Employment

Machine Learning Intern, Netflix Research, Summer 2023.
AI Resident, X, the moonshot factory (formerly Google X), Fall 2021.
Data Scientist Intern, Amazon, Summer 2020.
Risk/Quant Specialist Intern, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, Summer 2019.
Researcher, UCLA Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics RIPS Program, Summer 2018.
Undergraduate Researcher, UCLA Computational and Applied Math REU, Summer 2017.

Selected Awards

Florence Nightingale Award, International Biometric Society / Caucus for Women in Statistics.
Young Statistician Award, North America winner, International Biometric Society.
Adobe Data Science Research Award, $50,000 (with Jas Sekhon).

Teaching

Teaching Fellow, Yale University

S&DS 230/530 Data Exploration and Analysis (x2)
S&DS 238/538: Probability and (Bayesian) Statistics
S&DS 242/542: Theory of Statistics
S&DS 317/517: Applied Machine Learning and Causal Inference
S&DS 365/565: Data Mining and Machine Learning
S&DS 617: Applied Machine Learning and Causal Inference Research Seminar (x3)
S&DS 627: Statistical Consulting (x7)

Undergraduate Teaching Assistant, UC San Diego

ECON 5: Data Analytics for the Social Sciences
ECON 100A: Intermediate Microeconomics I
MATH 11: Calculus-Based Probability and Statistics (x3)
MATH 20E: Vector Calculus

Last updated: June 6, 2025.