I'm an Associate Professor of Mathematics at Queens College, CUNY in New York City. My Ph.D. and Masters is in Statistics from Wharton / UPenn. My doctoral thesis and current research program concentrates on improving the design of randomized experiments. We recently proved Fisher's blocking designs are optimal nearly 100yr after Fisher proposed blocking (see here).

Before graduate school, I was a software engineer building web applications. I still use these skills to run social science experiments and I'm interested in investigating racism and other types of discrimination (e.g. see here). My undergrad was in mathematics & computational science at Stanford.

I have a special love for teaching and mentoring. I helped to create and now administer the undergrad Data Science and Statistics concentration. My undergraduate alumni have gone on to data science, data engineering, data analyst and actuary careers at Wells Fargo, Webster Bank, Amazon, NASA, Grant Thornton, various tech startups, among others as well as various PhD programs at NYU, Drexel and Columbia.

I can't maintain all the pages of this website, so most of their information are all contained in my CV. For a printable PDF, click here. My github is here. I'm also available for private tutoring (in advanced mathematics, computer science, data science) and data science consulting which I've done for Tesorio and Coatue Management among others.

This server also serves my gradesly.com website.

ACADEMIC EXPERIENCE

Queens College, CUNY
Associate Professor, Mathematics
Aug, 2021 - present
Queens College, CUNY
Assistant Professor, Mathematics
Aug, 2014 - Jul, 2021
Technion
Visiting Scholar, Industrial Engineering and Management
Jul, 2018 - present

EDUCATION

Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania
Ph.D., Statistics
advisors: Abba Krieger and Ed George
thesis: Statistical Analysis & Design of Crowdsourcing Applications (PDF)
May, 2014
Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania
A.M., Statistics
May, 2012
Stanford University
B.S., Mathematical and Computational Science
Jun, 2006
California Institute of Technology
Jun, 2003

INDUSTRY EXPERIENCE

Coatue, LLC.
Data Scientist
Built models to help a quantitative hedge fund make investment decisions and developed algorithms to enhance trading efficiency.
Summer, 2019
DictionarySquared, Inc.
Founder & CTO
Conceived and engineered a web application that teaches vocabulary to high school students via reading contextual snippets. Used by thousands of students nationwide. Received an Institute of Education Science (United States Department of Education) grant for $1.5M (see grants section), Wharton Business Plan Semifinalist 2010, Wharton Business Competition best business plan award.
Jan, 2008 - present
Eventbrite, Inc.
Software Engineer
First engineer
Apr, 2007 - Aug, 2007
Stanford University, Lab of Peter Lee
Staff Scientist
Conceived and engineered "GemIdent" - software that finds objects of interest in images (see inventions section) by using a Random Forests in a Java image GUI.
Jun, 2005 - Mar, 2007

AWARDS

Queens College Divisional Teaching Award
One award per year
Mar, 2023
National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship
$100K over three years
May, 2010 - Apr, 2013
J. Parker Bursk Memorial Award for Excellence in Research
One departmental award per year
Dec, 2013
Donald S. Murray Award for Excellence in Teaching
One departmental award per year
Dec, 2012
Intel Science Talent Search Semifinalist
300 semifinalists per year nationwide
Jan, 2002

TECHNICAL STRENGTHS

Software Languages
R, Stan, Java, Ruby on Rails, C++, Python, web
Other Skills
git, SQL, Linux, simulation via grid computing
Contact me by email at kapelner@gmail.com v24.12.29 © 2025 Dr. Adam Kapelner
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