Nail Hassairi

I am an economist and data scientist with a decade of experience applying causal inference, machine learning, and econometrics to problems that range from early childhood policy to marketing optimization to production systems at Amazon.

I hold a PhD in Economics from the University of Washington. At Amazon, I built a discrete choice econometric model for the buy box—the algorithm that decides which seller wins the sale—and led the A/B testing program that validated it against millions of live customer sessions. At Cultivate Learning (University of Washington), I spent seven years as a postdoctoral fellow and then senior research scientist, leading the quantitative work on program evaluations, stepped wedge trials, survey design, and quality measurement systems that shaped early childhood policy across multiple states.

Along the way, I mentored junior researchers—writing scaffolded assignments, matching people to problems they cared about, and fighting for their first-author credit on published work. I also applied natural language processing to 4,000 pieces of state legislation, built dynamic panel models for marketing channel optimization, and ran field experiments on Mechanical Turk to test fundamental predictions of labor economics. My research has been published in Education Finance and Policy, PLOS ONE, Early Education and Development, Early Childhood Research Quarterly, and the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology.

In 2024, I founded Frontier Enterprises—a company building AI-powered learning tools grounded in the science of spaced repetition, feedback, and retention. It is the crystallization of everything I have learned: computer science, causal inference, education research, and the conviction that learning can be made radically more efficient.

Before all of this, I was born in Zaghouan, Tunisia. I grew up in Prague, studied economics at Charles University, and crossed the Atlantic on an exchange program that became a fifteen-year chapter in Seattle. I now live in Prague again—Holešovice—where the work continues.