I work at the interface of information theory, statistics, theoretical computer science, and probability. I seek to obtain engineering insight into practically relevant problems by formulating and solving mathematical models. As part of this, I want to understand the relationship between combinatorial structure and computational tractability of high-dimensional inference. I co-organized a program at the Simons Institute focusing on this general research direction: https://simons.berkeley.edu/programs/si2021.

I advise these amazing students: Kiril Bangachev, Alina Harbuzova, Chenghao Guo (joint with Yury Polyanskiy), and Brice Huang (joint with Nike Sun).

Alumni of my group include: Enric Boix-Adserà (PhD, joining UPenn Statistics in Fall 2025, joint with Philippe Rigollet), Dheeraj Nagaraj (PhD, now at Google Research), Rares Buhai (MEng, now pursuing PhD at ETH), Nir Weinberger (postdoc, now on the faculty at Technion EE Dept), Mina Karzand (PhD, now on the faculty at UC Davis Statistics Dept), Austin Stromme (PhD, now on the faculty at ENSAE/CREST Statistics Dept, joint with Philippe Rigollet), Tanay Wakhare (SM), Sam Park (SM).

Matthew Brennan tragically passed away on Jan 26, 2021. He was in the final year of his PhD. We miss him dearly. His obituary is here.

I am in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, and am a member of LIDS and Center for Statistics, which are part of IDSS. Previously, I was a postdoc at MIT working with David Gamarnik and Devavrat Shah, and before that I received my PhD from the Department of EECS at UC Berkeley advised by David Tse. I completed my undergraduate degree in ECE at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, mentored by Bruce Hajek.