Academic Positions
Associate Professor
University of Wisconsin Madison. Department of Statistics.
August 2024 - Present.
Assistant Professor
University of Wisconsin Madison. Department of Statistics.
August 2018 - 2024.
Prager Assistant Professor
(Postdoctoral Position). Division of Applied Mathematics. Brown University.
July 2015 - June 2018
Education
PhD, Mathematical Sciences
2010 - 2015
Carnegie Mellon University.
Thesis: “Variational Limits of Graph Cuts on Point Clouds.” Adviser: Dejan Slepcev.
MSc, Mathematical Sciences
2010 - 2012
Carnegie Mellon University.
BSc, Mathematics
2005 - 2010
Universidad de los Andes. Bogotá, Colombia. Cum Laude.
Awards
● NSF CAREER: DMS-2236447 "Adversarial Robustness through the Lens of Mathematical Analysis and Geometry." 9/2023- 8/2028
● NSF Grant: DMS-2005797 “Variational Methods for the Analysis of Unsupervised Learning Algorithms.” 9/2020- 8/2023
● NSF Grant: DMS-1912802, Collaborative research: “Machine Learning and Inverse Problems in Discrete and Continuous Settings.” (PI together with Daniel Sanz-Alonso U. Chicago). 06/2019-8/2020
● Aranda-Ordaz Award. Awarded through the Bernoulli Society. The award is “bestowed for one thesis in Probability and one thesis in Statistics written by students from Latin America, regardless of the country of the university offering the degree, or by students from other nationalities who received the degree from a Latin American university.” 2016.
Invited Longer Term Visits
● Prodi Visiting Professor, Department of Mathematics, University of Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany. Summer semester 2026.
● Department of Statistics, Columbia University. Visiting Professor. Fall Semester 2024.
● Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing “Geometric Methods in Optimization and Sampling” program. August 30 to December 3, 2021.
● CCIMI (Cantab Capital Institute for the Mathematics of Information) within the Department of Applied Mathematics and Physics at the University of Cambridge. During my visit I taught a mini-course titled: “The use of geometry for learning, and the learning of geometry from data.” Duration: 1 month. June 2019.
● Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences (Leipzig, Germany) Duration: 1 week in May 2019.
● (ESI) The Erwin Schrodinger International Institute for Mathematics and Physics (Vienna,Austria). Duration: 2 weeks in May 2019.
● ICERM “Network Science and Graph Algorithms” semester program. Duration: 1 month in February 2014.
Conferences and Programs Organized
●Co-organizer of the Statistics and Data Science Workshop at Universidad de Los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia. December 9-12, 2025.
https://stats-workshop.github.io/
●Co-organizer of the workshop “Mathematical Analysis of Adversarial Machine Learning” at BIRS-CMO, Oaxaca, México. August 2025. https://www.birs.ca/events/2025/5-day-workshops/25w5469
●Co-organizer of the mini-symposium “Collective Dynamics in Multi-Agent Systems: Advances in Learning and Optimization” at SIAM Conference on Applied Dynamical Systems (DS25) , Atlanta,GA, USA. May 11-12,2025.
●Co-organizer of the workshop “Statistics and Optimal Transport Workshop” at Columbia University, New York, USA. March 27 to 28, 2025. https://mathworkshops.wixsite.com/statsandot2025
● Co-organizer of the mini-symposium “Interacting Particle Systems in Data Science: From Theory to Applications” at the SIAM Conference on Mathematics of Data Science 2024, Atlanta, Georgia, USA, October 21-25, 2024.
● Co-organizer and lecturer for the summer school “Optimal Transport Through The Midwest”, July 15-19, 2024, Madison, WI. https://mathworkshops.wixsite.com/otmidwest2024
● Lecturer at the Winter Program in Machine Learning 2024, UT Austin, January 2024. https://analysispde.ma.utexas.edu/winter-program-in-ml-2024/
●Organizer of the “Third Graduate Student Conference: Geometry and Topology meet Data Analysis and Machine Learning (GTDAML2023).” June 8 - June 10 , 2023, Northeastern University, Boston, USA. https://gtdaml.wixsite.com/2023/home
● Co-organizer of the mini-symposium “Adversarial robustness at the interface of analysis, geometry, and statistics” at ICIAM 2023, Tokyo, Japan.
● Lead organizer of the AMS MRC program “Data Science at the Crossroads of Analysis, Geometry, and Topology.” 2022-2023. https://www.ams.org/programs/research-communities/2022MRC-DataSci
●Organizer of the “Second Graduate Student Conference: Geometry and Topology meet Data Analysis and Machine Learning (GTDAML2021).” July 30 - August 1, 2021. More than a hundred graduate students from around the world participated in GTDAML 2021. https://gtdaml.wixsite.com/2021
● Co-organizer of "Optimal Transport, Topological Data Analysis and Applications to Shape and Machine Learning" @ MBI OSU, July 27 - July 31, 2020.
● Co-founder and co-organizer of the series of graduate student conferences: “Geometry and topology meet Data Analysis and Machine learning.” The first edition took place in Ohio State University on June 1-2. More than 80 students participated in the conference from the midwest region and beyond. For more information visit: https://tgda.osu.edu/gtdaml2019/