Dr. Ronald Yurko

Assistant Teaching Professor, Director of Carnegie Mellon Sports Analytics Center, Department of Statistics & Data Science, Carnegie Mellon University

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States of America

Research Expertise

Statistics
Machine Learning
Sports Analytics
Data Science
Natural Language Processing
Bayesian statistics

About

Ron Yurko is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Statistics & Data Science at Carnegie Mellon University, and is the Director of the Carnegie Mellon Sports Analytics Center. His research focuses on developing methods at the interface of inference and machine learning, oriented towards problems in sports analytics and natural language processing. His work has been featured in popular media outlets such as The Athletic, FiveThirtyEight, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. He is a three-time degree holder from Carnegie Mellon: with a bachelors, masters, and PhD in Statistics. He also has industry experience in both finance and professional sports.

Publications

NFL ghosts: A framework for evaluating defender positioning with conditional density estimation
The Annals of Applied Statistics
2026
Swinging, Fast and Slow: Interpreting Variation in Baseball Swing Tracking Metrics
The American Statistician
2026
Do LLMs write like humans? Variation in grammatical and rhetorical styles
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
2025
A multilevel model with heterogeneous variances for snap timing in the National Football League
Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A: Statistics in Society
2025
Fractional tackles: leveraging player tracking data for within-play tackling evaluation in American football
Scientific Reports
2025
Exploring the difficulty of estimating win probability: a simulation study
Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports
2025
Analytics, Have Some Humility: A Statistical View of Fourth-Down Decision Making
The American Statistician
2025
The Landscape of College-Level Data Visualization Courses, and the Benefits of Incorporating Statistical Thinking
Journal of Statistics and Data Science Education
2025
CWAS-Plus: estimating category-wide association of rare noncoding variation from whole-genome sequencing data with cell-type-specific functional data
Briefings in Bioinformatics
2024
Here Comes the STRAIN: Analyzing Defensive Pass Rush in American Football with Player Tracking Data
The American Statistician
2023
An approach to gene-based testing accounting for dependence of tests among nearby genes
Briefings in Bioinformatics
2021
H-MAGMA, inheriting a shaky statistical foundation, yields excess false positives
Unknown Venue
2020
TRAP: a predictive framework for the Assessment of Performance in Trail Running
Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports
2020
Going deep: models for continuous-time within-play valuation of game outcomes in American football with tracking data
Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports
2020
A selective inference approach for false discovery rate control using multiomics covariates yields insights into disease risk
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
2020
Extracting NFL tracking data from images to evaluate quarterbacks and pass defenses
Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports
2020
Unsupervised methods for identifying pass coverage among defensive backs with NFL player tracking data
Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports
2020
nflWAR: a reproducible method for offensive player evaluation in football
Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports
2019
Beyond the Box Score: Does Icing the Field Goal Kicker Work in the NFL?
CHANCE
2024
Ron Yurko and Rebecca Nugent’s contribution to the Discussion of ‘Flexible marked spatio-temporal point processes with applications to event sequences from association football’ by Narayanan, Kosmidis, and Dellaportas
Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series C: Applied Statistics
2023
Reducing Concussions in the NFL: A Data-Driven Approach
CHANCE
2019
An Introduction to Sports Analytics Research with Expected Goals
Foundations for Undergraduate Research in Mathematics
2025

Education

Carnegie Mellon University

PhD in Statistics, Statistics / May, 2022

Pittsburgh

Carnegie Mellon University

MS in Statistics, Statistics / 2018

Carnegie Mellon University

BS in Statistics (University Honors), Statistics / 2015

Experience

Carnegie Mellon University

Special Faculty / May, 2022July, 2022

Assistant Teaching Professor / August, 2022Present

Director, Carnegie Mellon Sports Analytics Center / September, 2024Present

National leader in sports analytics research and education initiatives.

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