Dr. Sima Siami-Namini is an adjunct professor in Economics with multiple degrees across many fields including: Macroeconomics | Econometrics & Time Series Analysis | Data Science | Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning | Experimental Economics
Ph.D. in Applied Economics, Texas Tech University, 2020
M.S. in Artificial Intelligence, University of North Texas, 2023
M.S. in Statistics, Texas Tech University, 2022
M.S. in Applied Economics, Texas Tech University, 2018
M.S. in Planning of Economic Systems, Shahid Beheshti University
B.S. in Economics, Alzahra University
She has more than 10 years experience applying econometrics, AI/ML, and time series analysis to solve complex problems across academia, government, and industry. Skilled in NLP, computer vision, and generative AI, delivering actionable, data-driven insights from end-to-end projects. Passionate about combining economic theory with innovative ML approaches to inform policy, business decisions, and interdisciplinary research.
In addition to working with students from OCA, Dr. Siami-Namini works for Mercor as an AI/ML Research & Data Science Specialist where she Led statistical evaluation and large-scale dataset validation to improve model robustness, accuracy, and reliability in production-scale AI workflows; Synthesized domain-specific research and structured knowledge sources to enhance factual grounding and reduce model hallucination risk; Designed evaluation rubrics and structured feedback pipelines to support reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) and improve reasoning alignment and; Directed high-fidelity annotation and labeling workflows to improve performance of multimodal and text-based machine learning systems.
She also teaches Experimental Economics at a graduate level at George Mason University in Virginia, undergraduate Macroeconomics at Prairie View A&M University in Texas as well as at Trident Technical College. She is also an Associate Editor of The Reviews of Economic Literature and Stanford University and of The Journal of Economic Surveys at Wiley.
In addition to her many current teaching and research roles, she has taught at The University of the Cumberlands, Westcliff University, Johns Hopkins University, Rutgers Uniersity at Mississippi State University. She also earned a graduate certificate in Economics and Public Policy from Harvard University.
