UW Professor & Statistics Expert Witness

Specialties & Experience of this Expert Witness

Additional Information

Dr. Aleksandr Aravkin is a statistical expert witness and tenured faculty member at the University of Washington, where he serves as Associate Professor of Applied Mathematics and Director of Mathematical Sciences at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME). He brings more than 15 years of hands-on experience building, validating, and explaining complex statistical models—expertise he applies to high-stakes litigation across civil and criminal matters. Dr. Aravkin has worked with state Attorneys General of Washington, Colorado, Oregon, and Kansas and with top law firms including Perkins Coie, Pillsbury, and Ballard Spahr. He has been deposed seven times and is known for delivering clear, defensible, and practical testimony. His litigation work spans election analysis, COVID-19 business-interruption claims, medical malpractice, damages estimation, general statistical analysis, and custom data analyses tailored to case-specific questions, including translating physical scenarios into quantitative models that assess risk, likelihood, and causation. At IHME, Dr. Aravkin leads the scientific team responsible for many of the statistical and computational methods behind globally recognized estimates of disease burden as well as global forecasting and epidemiological platforms. His group develops large-scale systems for modeling causation, uncertainty, time trends, and incomplete or noisy datasets—skills that directly translate to analysis of legal disputes informed by available data. With more than 170 peer-reviewed publications in leading journals such as The Lancet, Nature Medicine, JAMA, Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics, Journal of Machine Learning Research, and the Journal of the American Statistical Association, Dr. Aravkin is internationally recognized for advancing robust, transparent, and well-validated methods. He specializes in clarifying what the data actually shows, what it does not support, and how competing statistical claims compare. Dr. Aravkin is particularly effective at translating complex modeling into clear, courtroom-ready explanations. He works closely with legal teams to evaluate evidence, identify weaknesses or strengths in opposing analyses, and present findings in a straightforward manner that judges and juries can understand.