UC Berkeley Professor Joshua Blumenstock uses machine learning and AI to solve the world's biggest global development challenges.
By Charlotte Khadra
July 2, 2026
Joshua Blumenstock was always interested in being of service to others. “Ever since high school, I’ve been interested in working in low income settings to help improve living standards and create opportunities,” he says. “But my strengths as a scholar were on the technical side — computer science, artificial intelligence, quantitative analysis.”
At first, Blumenstock didn’t see a straight line between his skillset and those kinds of global development issues, but during his time as a graduate student at UC Berkeley, a path began to emerge. “I started to see angles where the tools that I was good at might provide a different perspective on some of the questions that people had been studying for a long time,” he says.
