Assistant Professor
Department of Sport AnalyticsDepartment
Location
Syracuse, NY 13244Biography
Hassan Rafique (he/him/his) joined the Department of Sport Analytics in the David B. Falk College of Sport in Fall 2025 as a tenure-track assistant professor. He teaches classes in sport analytics, primarily statistical analysis and machine learning.
Prior to joining Syracuse University, Rafique was an assistant professor of instruction from 2023-25 at the University of Iowa, where he taught programming, machine learning, and visualization. Previously, he served as an assistant professor of data science and the founding director of the Center for Data Science at the University of Indianapolis from 2020-23.
Rafique's research interests are sport analytics, machine learning, and optimization. He specifically focuses on developing advanced methods and tools to estimate and predict the performance of individual players and teams, which is crucial information for team front offices. His work on cricket analytics was recognized at the Carnegie Mellon Sports Analytics Conference and the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Research Conference. His research has been published at the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), Journal of Machine Learning Research, and Optimization Methods and Software.
Rafique won first place in the reproducible research competition at the 2022 Carnegie Mellon Sports Analytics Conference. He received the 2024 Tippie Instructor Award for the business analytics program. His work on interpretable machine learning received a best paper runners-up award at the Data Mining Conference at 2019 INFORMS. He was nominated for the prestigious Hancher Finkbine student medallion in 2019. He received the Outstanding Teaching Assistant award in 2017, and a graduate teaching fellowship in 2018.
Rafique earned a Ph.D. in applied mathematical and computational sciences from the University of Iowa in 2020. He completed an M.S. in mathematics from Western Illinois University in 2015 and a B.S. in mathematics from the Lahore University of Management Sciences in 2012. He attained a Certificate of College Teaching from the University of Iowa in 2019.