Biography
Timothy (Tim) Fraser is an Ezra Systems Research Associate, teaching in the Systems Engineering Program at Cornell University since 2022. He is also Coordinator for the Center for Transportation, Environment, and Community Health (CTECH) at Cornell. He is a computational social scientist, developing methods, systems, and software to help communities combat environmental crises, using big data analytics, networks, GIS, and AI.
He has published 46 peer-reviewed studies, plus dashboards, R packages, software, and chapters, on urban resilience and environmental systems in the U.S. and Japan. His research examines how local-level decisions and resources, eg. social infrastructure, networks, and data communication affect socio-technical systems, examining outcomes like emissions, hurricane evacuation, disaster recovery, and pandemic outcomes and mobility.
Research Interests
His current research focuses on developing AI and cloud-computing tools to quantify, visualize, and communicate environmental policy data to the public to support climate action and community resilience for socio-technical systems.
Tim’s research has been funded by local and national grants, including a 2016 Fulbright fellowship, Natural Hazards Center grants, and 2020 Fulbright Hays and Japan Foundation doctoral fellowships (declined due to COVID-19), among others. He has done data consulting on resilience planning for United Nations Development Programme’s Accelerator Labs in Mexico and Paraguay, among others. In October 2024, he advised OECD researchers in Paris on urban analytics for mapping social infrastructure, a key correlate of crisis resilience.
Tim regularly leads research teams with master of engineering students, working together to develop APIs, dashboards, cloud orchestration systems, AI models, statistical modeling pipelines, and more. Currently, Tim leads software development for the Climate Action in Transportation team, building dashboards, databases, APIs, and cloud-computing jobs to help local decision-makers estimate emissions from transportation online.
If interested in joining his research team, please contact Dr. Tim Fraser by email.
Teaching Interests
Previously, he served as an Ezra Systems Postdoctoral Associate at Cornell in 2022, taught and earned his Ph.D. in political science from Northeastern University from 2017 to 2022, and researched as a Fulbright Fellow at Kyushu University in 2016.
Tim is passionate about teaching data science and systems engineering. He teaches four courses for the Systems Engineering program, including Systems Engineering and Six Sigma, Systems Architecture, Data Science for Socio-Technical Systems, and the Statistics and Probability Bootcamp. He teaches statistical coding and software development in R, Python, and/or MATLAB. Tim has built dozens of coding trainings in R on data science with applications to disaster recovery, climate data, social infrastructure, and more, including an open-sourced textbook for System Reliability and Statistical Analysis in R.
Select Publications
Education
- Ph.D. (Political Science), Northeastern University 2022
- M.A. (Political Science), Northeastern University, 2019
- B.A. (International & Global Studies), Middlebury College 2016