James’ Website

Hi, I’m a PhD student in the Department of Statistics at the University of Washington, Seattle, where I’ve been fortunate to work with Eardi Lila and Marina Meila. I received my Bachelor of Science degree in Applied Mathematics, Engineering, and Physics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Research Interests

Broadly my research interest is in feature learning when we have additional geometric information we can exploit.

High dimensional data often lies on a low dimensional manifold; knowing this makes working with data much easier. If we explicitly know the manifold (for example, the manifold of positive semidefinite matrices, which covariance matrix data lies on) then we immediately know all the tangent spaces at points, the shortest paths and distances between points, and a way to do calculus on functions defined on it. If we don’t know the manifold then we have to infer these things which is much harder, but the knowledge that the structure of the data is low-dimensional is still helpful. I’m interested in both settings.

Education

• Ph.D. in Statistics, University of Washington, Seattle, Oct. 2020 – Present
• B.S. in Applied Mathematics, Engineering, and Physics, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Sep. 2016 – Jun. 2020