DSSI Advisory Board

Rachel Levy (Ray)

Rachel Levy (Ray) is the inaugural Executive Director of the NC State University Data Science and AI Academy and Professor of Mathematics. An award-winning educator and communicator, she is dedicated to fostering the responsible and effective use of data and AI. She leads the University’s AI Advisory Group and has served on the Governor’s Council on Workforce and Apprenticeships.

Dr. Levy’s diverse background includes serving as Associate Dean at Harvey Mudd College, national leadership roles with the MAA and SIAM, and service as an AMS Congressional Policy Fellow in the US Senate, reflecting her commitment to bridging academia, policy, and industry.

Karamatou Yacoubou-Djima

Karamatou Yacoubou-Djima is an Assistant Professor in the Mathematics Department at Wellesley College. Her research is in applied and computational harmonic analysis and mathematical data science, with a focus on graph-based methods and tensor techniques. She is particularly interested in developing mathematical tools for analyzing complex, high-dimensional data, drawing on ideas from harmonic analysis, numerical linear algebra, and signal processing. From 2021 to 2024, Yacoubou-Djima’s work was supported by NSF-DMS 2232344, “Uncovering and Exploiting Multiscale Structures in Big Data Using Diffusion-Based Representation and Optimal Sampling.”

Yacoubou-Djima received her PhD in Mathematics from the University of Maryland, College Park, under the guidance of Professor Wojciech Czaja. Following her PhD, she was a postdoctoral fellow at Swarthmore College before serving as an Assistant Professor at Amherst College, and later joining the faculty at Wellesley College.