Seth Flaxman is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at Oxford. Originally from the Chicago area, he received his PhD in 2015 from Carnegie Mellon University in machine learning and public policy (School of Computer Science and Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy) and has worked for the World Health Organization. 

Seth’s research is on spatiotemporal statistics and Bayesian machine learning, applied to public policy, global health and social science. He was part of the Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team, leading a number of publications on non-pharmaceutical interventions, computational epidemiology, and COVID-19 orphanhood. He has published on filter bubbles / echo chambers in media, the Big Data paradox, and the regulation of machine learning algorithms. 

He oversees statistics for the Global Reference Group for Children Affected by Crisis. Seth won the Samsung AI Researcher of the Year Award (2020) and the SPI-M-O Award for Modelling and Data Support (2022) for modelling advice provided to the UK government during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2022, he co-founded the Machine Learning & Global Health network of researchers spanning three continents with a kick-off workshop held in Kigali, Rwanda at the premier deep learning conference, ICLR, in 2023.