I am an Assistant Professor of Statistics at Harvard University, currently on leave as a Visiting Professor at MIT’s Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems. I work on high-dimensional and overparametrized problems arising in statistics, machine learning, and data science. My research has been supported by the NSF CAREER Award, an NSF DMS Award, the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fund for Strategic Innovation, a William F. Milton Fund Award, and a Dean’s Competitive Fund for Promising Scholarship. Among other honors, in ’21, I was invited to speak at the National Academies’ of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine symposium on Mathematical Challenges for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI). In ’23, I was named an International Stategy Forum (ISF) Fellow—an 11-month, non-residential fellowship program for rising leaders ages 25 – 35. From ’22-’24, I led the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS) New Researchers Group. Currently, I serve as an Associate Editor for Statistical Science and as an invited Guest Co-Editor for their special issue on statistics and AI. Here are links to my CV, Google Scholar, and Math Genealogy. For a summary of my major research contributions, see the Research tab.

Previously, I was an Invited Long-Term Participant at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing, UC Berkeley for their Computational Complexity of Statistical Inference Program during Fall ’21. I was a postdoc at the Center for Research on Computation and Society, Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (hosted by Prof. Cynthia Dwork) during ’19-’20. I obtained my Ph.D. in Statistics (’19) from Stanford University, where I was honored to receive the Theodore W. Anderson Theory of Statistics Dissertation Award (’19) and the Ric Weiland Graduate Fellowship (’17). My advisor was Prof. Emmanuel Candès. I obtained my B.Stat (’12) and M.Stat (’14) from the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata.

Openings

I am currently looking for motivated students with a strong theoretical background, interested in high-dimensional statistics, machine learning, or AI theory. Interested aspiring graduate students should apply here.

Contact

Science Center 712
One Oxford Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
pragya at fas dot harvard dot edu