Nitin Kohli

Nitin Kohli is a Staff Scientist at UC Berkeley's Center for Effective Global Action, Principal Investigator of the Data Privacy Lab, and Differential Privacy and Synthetic Data Consultant at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, researching topics that span privacy, fairness, and manipulability of algorithms. 

Drawing upon the combination of technical, legal, and social science scholarship, Nitin develops theory, tools, and frameworks that safeguard individuals while attending to the social and political context of their use. In particular, Nitin researches and utilizes techniques from applied mathematics -- such as game theory and mechanism design, cryptography, and statistics -- to not only construct mechanisms with provable guarantees, but also to show the inherent limitations and tradeoffs present in certain technologies that are deployed in particular a context. In 2023, Nitin was awarded the International iSchools Best Doctoral Dissertation Award for his research on differential privacy.

Nitin has also worked as a data scientist in industry, as well as an adjunct instructor and lead instructor / lecturer at UC Berkeley, teaching both introductory and advanced courses in elementary mathematics, probability, statistics, and game theory. In 2019, Nitin was awarded both the Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award and the Teaching Effectiveness Award for his work in Info 188 (Behind the Data: Humans and Values) under Professor Deirdre Mulligan. 

Prior to his current role, Nitin was a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley's Center for Effective Global Action, where he worked with Professor Joshua Blumenstock to develop of novel privacy-enhancing technologies for humanitarian, anti-poverty, and financial inclusion initiatives. Nitin received his PhD from UC Berkeley's School of Information under the supervision of Professor Deirdre Mulligan. Nitin has also worked closely with Professor Paul Laskowski on the mathematics of information and privacy, and spent time as a visiting graduate student at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing.