Students Advised

Students who wrote Ph.D. dissertations under my direction

Joseph McQuown
Title of Thesis: A Multiscale, Geometric Algorithm for Non-Parametric Data Exploration with an Application to Genomic Data
Year of Graduation: 2007
Granting Institute: SUNY, Stony Brook, NY (his formal advisor there was James Glimm, I was at UMN)
Current Position: Equity Statistical Arbitrage, Graham Capital Management, L.P., Rowayton, CT

Guangliang Chen
Title of Thesis: Spectral Curvature Clustering for Hybrid Linear Modeling
Year of Graduation: 2009
Granting Institute: University of Minnesota
Position after graduation: Visiting Assistant Professor, Mathematics, Duke University, Durham, NC
Current Position: Associate Professor, Mathematics and Statistics, San Jose State University, San Jose, CA

J. Tyler Whitehouse
Title of Thesis: Generalized Sines, Multiway Curvatures, and the Multiscale Geometry of d-Regular Measures
Year of Graduation: 2009
Granting Institute: University of Minnesota
Position after graduation: NTT Professor, Mathematics, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN
Current Position: Senior Product Manager, NVIDIA

Teng Zhang
Title of Thesis: Modeling Data by Multiple Subspaces: Theory and Algorithms
Year of Graduation: 2011
Granting Institute: University of Minnesota
Position after graduation: IMA postdoc, IMA, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, MN
Current Position: Associate Professor, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL

Yi Grace Wang
Title of Thesis: Robust Hybrid Linear Modeling and its Applications
Year of Graduation: 2012
Position after graduation: SAMSI postdoctoral fellow, SAMSI, Research Triangle Park, NC
Next position: Assistant Professor, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY (had to move to CA)
Current position: Assistant Professor, California State University, Dominguez Hills, CA

Xu Wang
Title of Thesis: Searching, Clustering and Regression on non-Euclidean Spaces
Year of Graduation: 2015
Granting Institute: University of Minnesota
Position after graduation: SEW Assistant Professor (NTT), UCSD, San Diego, CA

Bryan Poling
Title of Thesis: Towards a Framework for Simultaneous Feature Tracking and Segmentation
Year of Graduation: 2016
Position after graduation: Co-founder and chief engineer, Sentek Systems

Jeffrey Moulton
Title of Thesis: Robust Fragmentation: A Data-Driven Approach to Decision-Making under Distributional Ambiguity
Joint advisor: Shuzhong Zhang
Year of Graduation: 2016
Position after graduation: Quantitative analyst/data scientist, advertising team, Google Inc.

John Goes
Title of Thesis: Robust Sparse Covariance Estimation
Year of Graduation: 2017
Position after graduation: Fixed Income Quantitative Research Analyst, Lord, Abbett & Co. LLC

Tyler Maunu
Title of Thesis: A Framework for Nonconvex Robust Subspace Recovery
Year of Graduation: 2018
Position after graduation: Applied Mathematics Instructor, Mathematics Department, MIT, Boston, MA

Vahan Huroyan
Title of Thesis: Mathematical Formulations, Algorithms and Theory for Big Data Problems
Year of Graduation: 2018
Position after graduation: Postdoctoral Research Associate, Department of Mathematics, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ

Mauricio Flores
Title of Thesis: Algorithms for lp-based Semi-supervised Learning
Joint advisor: Jeff Calder
Year of Graduation: 2018
Position after graduation: Data scientist, Target, Minneapolis, MN
Current position: Senior Applied Research Scientist, Cruise, Sunnyvale, CA

Madeline Handschy
Title of Thesis: Spin Glasses and Signal Detection
Joint advisor: Wei-Kuo Chen
Year of Graduation: 2019
Position after graduation: Data scientist, NextEra Analytics, St. Paul, MN
Current position: Senior Data scientist, NextEra Analytics, St. Paul, MN

Alex Gutierrez
Title of Thesis: Perturbation theory of polyhedral seminorms under linear constraints
Year of Graduation: 2020
Position after graduation: Quantitative analyst/data scientist, Google Inc.
Current position: Senior Data scientist, Google Inc.

Yunpeng Shi
Title of Thesis: Robust estimation in 3D computer vision
Year of Graduation: 2020
Position after graduation: Postdoctoral fellow, Princeton University, NJ

Zachi Attia
Title of Thesis: Explaining Predictive Artificial Intelligence Models for ECG using Shallow and Generative Models
Granting program: Bioinformatics and computational biology (BICB), University of Minnesota, Rochester
Joint advisor: Paul Friedman (Mayo Clinic)
Year of Graduation: 2020
Position after graduation: Director of Artificial Intelligence, Senior Associate Consultant and Assistant Professor, Mayo Clinic

Chieh-Hsin (Jesse) Lai
Title of Thesis: Robustness and Stability of Deep Learning
Year of Graduation: 2021
Position after graduation: Senior Research Engineer, Sony Corporation, San Jose, CA
Current position: Research and Development Engineer, Sony R&D, Tokyo, Japan

Current Ph.D. students

Students who wrote M.Sc. dissertations under my direction

Amrudin Agovic
Title of Thesis: Anomaly Detection using Manifold Embedding and its Applications in Transportation Corridors
Year of Graduation: 2008
Granting Institute: University of Minnesota
Current Position: CEO and chief scientist at Reliancy

Ardeshir Ebtehaj
Title of Thesis: Variational Data Assimilation via Sparse Regularization
Year of Graduation: 2015
Granting Institute: University of Minnesota
Current Position: Assistant Professor of Engineering, University of Minnesota

Mehdi Behroozi
Title of Thesis: Optimization Methods in Geometric Shape Approximation
Year of Graduation: 2021 (delayed since time of advising)
Granting Institute: University of Minnesota
Current Position: Assistant Professor, Industrial Engineering, Northeastern University

Some undergraduate students who worked with me on research problems

Matt Coudron
Year of Graduation: 2011
Granting Institute: University of Minnesota
Position after graduation: Ph.D. student at EECS, MIT

Kyle Heuton
Year of Graduation: 2012
Granting Institute: University of Minnesota
Position after graduation: Post-Bachelor Fellow, Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, Seattle, WA

Tyler Maunu
Year of Graduation: 2013
Granting Institute: University of Minnesota
Position after graduation: Ph.D. student, Mathematics, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

Michael Veit
Year of Graduation: 2014
Granting Institute: University of Minnesota
Position after graduation: Ph.D. candidate, Physics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA

Yunpeng Shi
Year of Graduation: 2015
Granting Institute: University of Minnesota
Position after graduation: Ph.D. candidate, Mathematics, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, MN

Chenyu Yu
Year of Graduation: 2021
Granting Institute: University of Minnesota
Position after graduation: Ph.D. candidate, Operation research and financial engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ