Academic Credentials
  • Ph.D., Physics, University of California, Davis, 2017
  • M.S., Physics, University of California, Davis, 2012
  • B.S., Applied Mathematics, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2011
  • B.S., Physics, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2011
Licenses & Certifications
  • AI in Healthcare Specialization
  • Amazon Web Services (AWS) Certified Cloud Practitioner
  • Applied Data Science with Python Specialization
  • Graduate Statistician (GStat)
  • IBM Data Science Professional Certificate
  • TensorFlow Developer
Academic Appointments
  • Teaching Assistant, Department of Physics, University of California, Davis, 2011-2013, 2017
  • Graduate Student Researcher, Department of Physics, University of California, Davis, 2013-2017
  • Graduate Student Researcher, CERN, 2013-2017
  • Undergraduate Researcher, Department of Physics, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2008-2011
  • Undergraduate Researcher, Department of Mathematics, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2009
  • Undergraduate Researcher, Department of Mathematics, University of Georgia, 2008
Professional Affiliations
  • American Geriatrics Society (member)
  • International Society for Pharmacoepidemiology (member)
  • American Statistical Association (member)
  • American Physical Society (member)
  • Secure Technology Alliance (member)

Dr. Dustin Burns assists clients in the healthcare and government sectors design and implement data strategies, scale data architectures, and perform complex statistical analyses. Combining his background in laboratory experiments with his expertise in data analytics and cloud computing, Dr. Burns contributes to projects along the entire data science lifecycle, from experimental design and data collection, through data quality evaluation, exploratory data analysis and cleaning, to modeling, visualization, and reporting. 

While applying statistical learning and Artificial Intelligence methods to address traditional business problems in new ways, Dustin strives to incorporate in his work the principles of security, explainability, and reducing algorithmic bias. Dustin navigates the murky pool of healthcare data providers, pharmaceutical companies, regulatory agencies, care provider networks, academic research groups, and related software vendors. Combining electronic health records (EHR) and various data linkages, Dustin administrates the databases underlying pharmacoepidemiologic studies for post-marketing safety and effectiveness. Additionally, he performs statistical programming in the execution of these studies, particularly when complex multivariate cohort definitions, diagnoses, and medical codes are involved.

Dustin received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of California, Davis, in the field of experimental high-energy particle and astroparticle physics. Dustin's dissertation research was based at the European Council for Nuclear Research (CERN) Large Hadron Collider (LHC), where he worked on the team that contributed to the discovery of the Higgs boson, a new fundamental particle of nature, in 2012. Additionally, Dustin is a founding member of the CRAYFIS: Cosmic RAYs Found In Smartphones (http://crayfis.io) experiment, where he helped design a crowd-sourced comic ray detector array using the cameras in smartphones. More recently, Dustin has applied AI and Machine Learning approaches to evaluate data in a number of commercial and defense settings. The commercial work includes analysis of data from healthcare, medical device, utilities, and environmental science clients. The defense work focuses on the management of large databases and analyses for Department of Defense personnel data. This work includes fundamental research on supply chain security, insider threat, and cyber threat detection and mitigation. 

In his current role at Exponent, Dustin leads multidisciplinary teams to respond to the world's most impactful problems and to evaluate emerging technologies using AI. Employing expertise in statistics, AI and Machine Learning, programming in multiple languages and cloud computing environments, Dustin's teams can assist with developing custom algorithms, modernizing analytics programs, advising on regulatory issues , and helping to evaluate intellectual property.