Nikunj Oza

Leader, Data Sciences Group

NASA's Ames Research Center

Nikunj Oza is the leader of the Data Sciences Group at NASA's Ames Research Center. He also leads a NASA project team that researches and applies machine learning to aviation safety and operations. Dr. Oza’s 50+ research papers represent his research interests, which include data mining, machine learning, ensemble learning, anomaly detection, and their applications to Aeronautics and Earth Science. He received the Arch T. Colwell Award for co-authoring one of the five most innovative technical papers selected from 3300+ SAE technical papers in 2005. His data mining team received the 2018 and 2019 NASA Honor Awards and the 2010 NASA Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate Associate Administrator¹s Award. In 2019, he was named by Cognilytica as one of 50 key people in the US government working to move the adoption of AI forward across the industry. He is an Associate Editor for the peer-reviewed journal Information Fusion (Elsevier) and has served as organizer, senior program committee member, and program committee member of several data mining and machine learning conferences. He received his B.S. in Mathematics with Computer Science from MIT in 1994, and M.S. (in 1998) and Ph.D. (in 2001) in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley.