Lives of Consequence
Richard Scheines '79
Dean of the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Carnegie Mellon University
Currently the dean of the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University, Richard Scheines ’79 was part of the team of social scientists who made a major contribution to scientific methodology with the development of statistical and computational methods for causal discovery. The work has since spanned 30 years and recently became the focus of a successful $11 million grant to establish an NIH Center for Causal Discovery at the University of Pittsburgh.
“I never dreamed that the history and philosophy of science courses I took at Hobart would lead to that,” Scheines says.
Scheines began studying causal discovery in the social sciences – learning about causation from statistical evidence – as a graduate student at the University of Pittsburgh under the guidance of his adviser, Clark Glymour. The duo was joined by Glymour’s former student, Peter Spirtes, and first introduced their statistical methods for causal discovery inCausation, Prediction and Search, published in 1990. According to the publication, the methods can be used to help obtain scientific explanations or to predict outcomes of actions, experiments or polices.
Nearly 30 years after its publication, computational methods for causal psychology, which involves using computers to discover causal information buried in large collections of observation, is now a standard topic in machine learning and statistics conferences. The methods have been applied to genetics research, brain imaging studies, educational research, economics, sociology and psychology, among many other disciplines.
In 2005, Scheines shifted his work into the classroom to become head of the Philosophy Department at Carnegie Mellon. He has also been a visiting scholar in the Department of Psychology at U.C. Berkeley, in UCLA’s Program in Advanced Quantitative Methods in Educational Research, and in the Department of Statistics and Measurement Theory at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands.
In 2014, he took his current position as dean of Carnegie Mellon’s School of Humanities and Social Sciences. Scheines also has a courtesy appointment in the Machine Learning Department and in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute.
“Being dean has made me think hard about what it is to deliver a great college education beyond a rigorous and focused major like economics or psychology, and I regularly find myself returning to my experience at Hobart for guidance,” he says.
Scheines, who says he “loved physics and biology,” as an HWS student, put his pursuit of physical sciences to a halt after struggling through an “Introduction to Physics” course. He found a different route into the subject with the help of then HWS Professor of Psychology Martin Kelly, who introduced Scheines to how fields like philosophy, history, psychology and economics could be applied to the “peculiar but amazing intellectual enterprise that is science.”
“Kelly lit us up with great discussions that got to the historical drama of scientific discovery, but that were in turn very philosophical,” Scheines remembers. “He transformed my life. He showed us the power of interdisciplinary thinking, and for the first time, I was academically curious in a way that made me feel like I needed to learn more.”
Scheines earned his Ph.D. in the History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Pittsburgh.