Katya Vasilaky

Kathryn Vasilaky is an associate professor in the Economics Area of the Orfalea College of Business at Cal Poly.

Her research topics are situated in experimental and development economics, utilizing lab experiments in the field, randomized control trials (RCT), primarily in India and Sub-Saharan Africa, and quasi-randomized designs. She is interested in how social networks and group behavior affect information sharing and technology adoption, and how this differs across gender. Vasilaky’s current work builds on this by testing the framing of information with regards to resource management, some via web applications and information communication technologies that she has built.

Her secondary work is in regularization methods (ridge regression/tikhanov) and the inverse problem that address noisy and highly correlated data or ill-conditioned design matrices, relevant to non-parametric statistics, and big data.

In line with her research, Vasilaky believes in making stem accessible and free in an inclusive learning environments. To this end she has co-organized and taught for Pyladies NYC, Girls Who Code, and regularly volunteers and teaches workshops on programming (mostly in python) and data science.