Nitin Kohli

Nitin Kohli is a postdoctoral scholar at UC Berkeley's Center for Effective Global Action and the Global Policy Lab, researching topics that span privacy, fairness, and manipulability of statistical and algorithmic mechanisms. 

Drawing upon the combination of technical, legal, and social science scholarship, Nitin develops theory, tools, and frameworks that safeguard individuals while attending to the social and political context of their use. In particular, Nitin utilizes techniques from applied mathematics -- such as game theory and mechanism design, cryptography, and statistics -- to not only construct mechanisms with provable guarantees, but also to show the inherent limitations present in certain technologies that are deployed in particular a context. In 2023, Nitin was awarded the international iSchools Doctoral Dissertation Award for his research on differential privacy.

Nitin has also worked as a data scientist in industry, as well as an adjunct instructor and lead instructor / lecturer at UC Berkeley, teaching both introductory and advanced courses in elementary mathematics, probability, statistics, and game theory. In 2019, Nitin was awarded both the Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award and the Teaching Effectiveness Award for his work in Info 188 (Behind the Data: Humans and Values) under Professor Deirdre Mulligan. Of late, Nitin has been teaching courses relating to statistics, differential privacy, information law and policy, and the social and political implications of data science.

Nitin holds a PhD from UC Berkeley's School of Information, a master's degree in information and data science from UC Berkeley's School of Information, and a bachelor's degree in mathematics and statistics from UC Berkeley, with departmental honors in statistics.