Vera Institute of Justice

Dennis joined Vera’s Center on Immigration and Justice as a senior data scientist in August 2018. He specializes in applied statistical methods and causal inference, with a portfolio of work in diverse areas of research including the immigration courts, Army National Guard equipment maintenance, technology diffusion, and money markets.

He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from UCLA, and an M.S. in Management Science and Engineering and B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford. Dennis was previously at the Institute for Defense Analyses where he worked on a range of studies, advising on analytical strategy, collecting and managing large datasets, supervising and training other staff, and performing statistical and econometric analyses. One of these was a MacArthur-funded study on the impact of access to counsel for unaccompanied children, using EOIR data. Prior to his Ph.D., Dennis worked at the Federal Reserve Bank of NY, where he performed statistical and econometric analysis for banking, money market, and payments applications. He used large-scale algorithms to analyze the performance of the LIBOR market during the financial crisis.