Uncertainty & Computing

Vivak Patel, PhD

Principal Investigator

I am an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin—Madison in the Department of Statistics, and I am the principal investigator of this research group. I did my doctoral training in statistics at the University of Chicago under Mihai Anitescu. I did my masters in mathematics at Cambridge University (Churchill College). I did my bachelors degrees in applied physics and biomathematics at Rutgers University, and worked in the Biomedical engineering laboratory of David Shreiber.

Mohammad Jahangoshahi, PhD

Close Collaborator

Mohammad Jahangoshahi did his PhD in the Department of Statistics at the University of Chicago, and is now a quantitative researcher at Susquehanna International Group. His dissertation work was on stochastic differential equations, and his mathematical abilities extend well beyond that. He has been a close collaborator, especially in the topic of randomized linear algebra.

D. Adrian Maldonado, PhD

Close Collaborator

D. Adrian Maldonado is a Scientist at Argonne National Laboratory. He is also one of the finest mathematical programmers and software developers around. He has contributed to a number of major software packages including the PETSc library. He has been a close collaborator, especially in the topic of randomized linear algebra, and we are developing several software packages together.

Mihai Anitescu, PhD

Doctoral Advisor

Mihai Anitescu is a Senior Computational Mathematician in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory and is a professor for the Department of Statistics, Committee on Computational and Applied Mathematics, and the College at the University of Chicago. His research interests span energy systems, mathematics, statistics and computing. He was also patient enough to be my doctoral advisor while I was at the University of Chicago.

Yuji Saikai, PhD

Former (Shared) PhD Student

Yuji Saikai completed his PhD in 2020 from the University of Wisconsin—Madison in Agricultural and Applied Economics under the joint supervision of Paul Mitchell and me (mostly Paul). After his PhD, he became faculty at the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Melbourne. He left in 2024 to pursue a local food initiative, which seemed to be his calling even before he joined the PhD program.

Liam Johnston, PhD

Former PhD Student

Liam Johnston completed his PhD in 2024 from the University of Wisconsin—Madison in Statistics under my supervision. His work primarily focused on understanding the challenges of training deep neural networks, and he developed tremendous skills in building, training and analyzing these models that are the foundation of modern AI. He is currently pursuing the next stage of his career with an open mind.

Nathaniel Pritchard, PhD

Former PhD Student

Nathaniel Pritchard completed his PhD in 2024 from the University of Wisconsin—Madison in Statistics under my supervision. His work primarily focused on developing the theory and practice of randomized solvers for linear systems and least squares problems. He is an exceptional programmer and he is becoming an exceptional software developer. He is currently pursuing post doctoral training at Oxford University.

Christian Varner

Current PhD Student

Christian is a current PhD student at the University of Wisconsin—Madison in Statistics under my supervision. His work primarily focuses on developing principled globalization approaches for non-convex optimization problems arising in data science.

Tunan Wang

Current PhD Student

Tunan is a current PhD student at the University of Wisconsin—Madison in Computer Science under my supervision. His work primarily focuses on nonsmooth optimization problems arising in artificial intelligence.

Shushu Zhang

Former MS Student

Shushu was a master's student at the University of Wisconsin—Madison in Data Science under my supervision. Her work with me spanned stochastic optimization and data assimilation. She is currently a PhD student at the University of Michigan in the department of statistics. Her current work focuses on superquantile regression.

Bowen Tian

Former MS Student

Bowen was a master's student at the University of Wisconsin—Madison in Data Science under my supervision. His work with me focused on stochastic optimization. He is currently a PhD student at Ohio State University in the department of statistics.

Zekun (Bill) Wang

Former MS Student

Zekun (Bill) was a master's student at the University of Wisconsin—Madison in Data Science under my supervision. His work with me focused on understanding different smoothness conditions arising for stochastic optimization problems. He is currently a PhD student at Johns Hopkins University in the department of applied mathematics and statistics.

Yumian Cui

Former Undergraduate Student

Yumian was an undergraduate student at the University of Wisconsin—Madison majoring in Data Science and Economics. Her work with me focused on understanding the properties of training recurrent neural networks. She is now a master's student in computer science at Brown University.

Yiran Lin

Undergraduate Student

Yiran is an undergraduate student at the University of Wisconsin—Madison majoring in Statistics. Her work with me focuses on understanding nondifferentiability issues in training neural network models.

Arnav Shanbhag

Undergraduate Student

Arnav is an undergraduate student at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. His work with me focuses on globalization frameworks for optimization methods.