Oren Tirschwell

About

Nice to meet you!

Thanks for stopping by, and I hope you'll say hi. Let me share a little bit more about me!

Oren Tirschwell

Timeline

  1. 2016–20

    High school

    For three summers (2017–19), I taught middle schoolers in Hudson Scholars, a tuition-free program to reduce summer learning loss for free-and-reduced-lunch students in my local community. Those summers kindled my interest in educational equality, and now I'm on the program's Young Alumni Board!

  2. 2020–21

    Gap year

    I finally started to learn what data science was during this year. I first interned in telehealth and finance, learning as I went, and it quickly became clear that this intersection of math and computer science is a natural fit for my brain. In early 2021, I spent five months as one of two full-time volunteers at NeighborShare, a direct-giving nonprofit, building our first-ever internal donation reporting.

  3. 2021–25

    Amherst

    Amherst didn't offer a data science major, so I designed one: Applications of Data Science to Public Policy (and I was also a Statistics major). On top of the seventeen math, stats and CS classes I took, I audited combinatorics, graph theory, and numerical analysis in my spare time, sitting in on the lectures just to absorb as much math as I could. (That's the whole nerd thing again.)

  4. Summer 2024

    First summer at the Labs

    As an intern at the University of Chicago Crime Lab and Education Lab, I built a dashboard analyzing federal violence prevention grant funding in major U.S. cities, and I assembled public RCT data sets to evaluate our internal heterogeneous treatment effect modeling methods.

  5. 2025

    Thesis and graduation

    I worked on my honors thesis about guns in the home for three semesters, with four advisers. Topping out at over 160 pages, it included four journal-ready manuscripts, and two are now under review. I graduated that May, and I couldn't wait to get back to the Labs.

  6. Aug 2025

    The Labs

    I joined full time as an Associate Data Scientist, working from the Crime Lab's New York office. I'm now a Data Scientist, working on crime data and education trials.

  7. 2026

    AI, and back at NeighborShare

    AI has the potential to bring about great harm, but I'm also optimistic that organizations already doing good work in the world can harness these new tools to increase their impact even further. I'm a leader in the AI initiative at the Crime and Education Labs, and I'm starting to volunteer with NeighborShare again, specifically to help enhance our AI strategy!

Oren playing the cello

Music

I've played the cello since I was seven and a half.

In high school, I studied with Marion Feldman at the Manhattan School of Music Precollege. Those years began my passion for chamber music, which grew dramatically at Amherst. After three years of playing in as many chamber groups as I could find, in my senior year I founded and led Amherst College Artist Connections: ten student musicians taking chamber music out of the concert hall and around town, from the Jones Library to the Inn on Boltwood. We even played twice for the college's president and Board of Trustees.

At Amherst, I was also principal cellist of the Amherst Symphony Orchestra, and in December 2024 I played Shostakovich's First Cello Concerto as the orchestra's soloist. This was a dream come true, and I am so grateful to have had this opportunity!

Now, I'm playing in community orchestras and going to a LOT of concerts. I think I saw at least 15 programs at the NY Phil in the 2025–26 season!

  • Summa cum laude with distinction
  • Phi Beta Kappa
  • Three Minute Thesis People's Choice Award
  • Five College Statistics Prize
  • Walker Award for Leadership (Mathematics and Statistics)
  • Bancroft Prize for public speaking
  • Mu Sigma Rho

Questions about any of this?

Email me (music-related thoughts welcome too)!

orendev4@gmail.com