Howard Steven Friedman

Howard Steven Friedman is a data scientist, health economist, and writer who has worked in the public sector, private sector and academia for decades.

He teaches at Columbia University courses in Statistics, Data Science, Program Evaluation and Health Economics including courses on Machine Learning in R and Python.

Friedman took a position as a director at Capital One where he led teams of data scientists, statisticians, analysts and programmers in various areas of operations and marketing. He later formed companies that provided consulting services in areas of designing, developing and modeling data.

He has authored/co-authored about 100 scientific articles and book chapters in areas of data science, statistics, health economics and politics.

Friedman received his Bachelor’s degree from Binghamton University in Applied Physics. He earned a Masters in Statistics and Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from Johns Hopkins University.

His 2012 book, Measure of a Nation, focused on how to improve America by first comparing its performance with thirteen competitive industrial nations, then identifying the best practices found throughout the world that can be adopted here in the United States. Measure of a Nation was named by Jared Diamond as the best book of 2012 in an interview published in the New York Times.

His 2020 book, Ultimate Price (University of California Press) was featured on NPR's Marketplace and has been translated into multiple languages including Korean, Chinese and Japanese.

His 2023 book, Winning with Data Science teaches readers how to be a good data science customer, asking good questions and getting the most from your data science investment.

Please note that all publications reflect the opinions of the author and not those of the United Nations or Columbia University