Matias Cattaneo, a data scientist and professor of operations research and financial engineering, has received a 2026 Guggenheim Fellowship, joining a class of 223 scholars and innovators in the arts, sciences and humanities.
Cattaneo is one of seven Princeton faculty members and two visiting artists to receive Guggenheim Fellowships this year. Zubin Jacob, who earned a master’s degree in electrical engineering in 2007, is among 11 alumni recipients.
The fellowship, first established in 1925 by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, recognizes distinguished individuals based on their “prior career achievement and exceptional promise,” and provides a monetary stipend “to pursue independent work at the highest level under ‘the freest possible conditions,’” according to the foundation’s announcement.
Cattaneo’s work lies at the intersection of econometrics, statistics, machine learning, artificial intelligence and applied mathematics. He develops statistical and computational methods for the social, behavioral and biomedical sciences, with particular emphasis on program evaluation and causal inference.
This spring he is teaching a graduate course, “Econometrics for Policymakers,” in the School of Public and International Affairs. In the Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering, he has taught both graduate and undergraduate courses on statistical theory and methods.
Cattaneo served on the economics faculty at the University of Michigan before joining Princeton in 2019. He holds a Ph.D. in economics and an M.A. in statistics from the University of California-Berkeley, a master’s in economics from Universidad Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and a licentiate in economics from the University of Buenos Aires.
He was named an Amazon Scholar in 2021 and is an elected member of the International Statistical Institute and an elected fellow of the American Statistical Association, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and the International Association for Applied Econometrics.
