Rate My Professor Brian Powers

Brian Powers is a Teaching Faculty member and Lecturer in the Department of Statistics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a position he has held since 2022. He earned his Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2016, with a dissertation entitled "An Analysis of Multi-Issue Final-Offer Arbitration" in the field of game theory, advised by T.E.S. Raghavan. Powers previously received an M.S. in Financial Mathematics from Fairfield University in 2007 and a dual B.A. in Mathematics and Computer Science, cum laude, from Tufts University in 2003. Early in his career, he served as a Loan Administrator and Business Analyst at UBS Investment Bank from 2004 to 2008 and as a Treasury Analyst in the Finance Department at the Bahá’í World Centre in Haifa, Israel, from 2008 to 2010. Prior to joining UW-Madison, Powers spent six years at Arizona State University, first as a Research Postdoctoral Scholar from 2016 to 2019, where he developed dynamic models of fish species and fishers in the Gulf of Mexico supported by a GOMRI grant and conducted research in statistics, game theory, and justice, and subsequently as an Instructor teaching courses such as Introductory Applied Statistics and Calculus for Engineers.

Powers' research interests encompass the intersection of statistical methods, stochastic models, games, and issues of law and justice, including agent-based modeling, machine learning, social networks, and graph theory. His key publications include "An analysis of dual-issue final-offer arbitration" published in the International Journal of Game Theory (2018), "Dual-issue final-offer arbitration: Invariance of pure optimal strategies under Lp metrics" in the International Game Theory Review (2019), "Anti-coordination games and stable graph colorings" in Algorithmic Game Theory proceedings (2013, with Jeremy Kun and Lev Reyzin), and "Training-time optimization of a budgeted booster" in the Proceedings of the 24th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (2015, with Yi Huang and Lev Reyzin). He has presented extensively on topics including multivariate final-offer arbitration, N-player final-offer arbitration, fisheries modeling, and statistical web tools at venues such as the Joint Mathematics Meetings, International Conference on Game Theory, Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill & Ecosystem Science Conference, and Joint Statistical Meetings. Powers maintains broad teaching experience across institutions, including applied statistics and quantitative methods courses at Arizona State University, Southern New Hampshire University, University of Illinois at Chicago, Grand Canyon University, and others, as well as private tutoring. He contributes to ecological agent-based models with the Ocean Conservancy.