Dr. Zafari is an Associate Professor of the Practice in the Operations and Analytics (OPAN) area and the academic director of the Master of Science in Business Analytics (new window) (MSBA) program in the McDonough School of Business. His areas of research interest and expertise are machine learning methods for business applications, statistical models for natural language processing, anomaly detection and (healthcare) fraud analytics, Bayesian modeling, and online auctions. He has taught courses in the areas of business analytics, machine learning, business analytics capstone project, data, models, and decisions, and optimization methods at MBA, MSBA, undergraduate, and executive education programs.
Prior to joining Georgetown, he was an Assistant Professor of Statistics and Analytics at Babson College, and a Visiting Assistant Professor of Decision Sciences at The George Washington University School of Business. He was also a senior statistician consultant at Integrity Management Services, where he was responsible for developing statistical models for fraud and abuse detection in Medicare and Medicaid programs. He received his B.S. in Applied Mathematics from Sharif University of Technology, his M.S. in Computer Science/Operations Research from Bowling Green State University, and his Ph.D. in Decision Sciences from The George Washington University School of Business.