Students
I have had the opportunity to work with many wonderful students on problems in probability, random graphs, network science, statistics, and machine learning. My advising has included PhD students, master’s students, and broader dissertation mentoring across the department.
Current PhD Students
Current doctoral students and ongoing supervision.
Akshay Sakanaveeti
Former PhD Students
Former PhD students, with dissertation topics and subsequent positions where available.
Xuan Wang
Dissertation: Some Asymptotic Problems for Dynamic Random Graphs
First job after graduate school: postdoctoral fellow in probability at Georgia Tech. Later Data Scientist at Databricks.
James Wilson
Dissertation: Statistical Analysis of Relational Data: Mining and Modeling Complex Networks
Assistant Professor, University of San Francisco.
John Palowitch
Dissertation: Testing-based Community Detection Methods for Complex Networks.
Data Scientist, Internet Archive.
Jimmy Jin
Dissertation: Testing-based Community Detection Methods for Complex Networks.
Staff Data Scientist, LaunchDarkly.
Suman Chakraborty
Dissertation: Dense Graph Limits and Applications
Postdoctoral Scholar, University of Michigan.
Iain Carmichael
Dissertation: Probabilistic and Geometric Approaches to the Analysis of Non-standard Data.
NSF Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Washington. Currently a faculty in the School of Data Science and Society at UNC Chapel Hill.
Ruituo Fan
Dissertation: Learning Latent Community Structures in Network-based Data
Quantitative Researcher, Inno Asset Management.
Miheer Dewaskar
Dissertation: High-dimensional Problems in Statistics and Probability: Correlation Mining and Distributed Load Balancing.
Postdoctoral Scholar, Duke University. Currently faculty at the University of New Mexico.
Mark He
Dissertation: Community Detection in Multimodal Networks.
Postdoctoral Scholar, Columbia University. Currently senior applied statistician at NYU Medical Center.
Aman Barot
Dissertation: Techniques in Network Embedding and Gaussian Comparison for High-dimensional Statistics
Manager, American Credit Acceptance.
Dhruv Patel
Dissertation: Community Dynamic Factor Models: Correlation Networks, Clustering Guarantees and Vector Autoregressions.
Data Scientist, IDA.
Hui Shen
Dissertation: Consistency of Some Statistical Learning Techniques: Unsupervised Learning and Network Change Point.
Postdoctoral Scholar with Eric Kolaczyk, McGill University.
Sumit Kumar Kar
Dissertation: Three Essays on Influence Maximization in Networks.
Principal Biostatistician, Novartis (India).
Master’s Students
- Joe Zappa (2015) — Convex Geometry and Concentration Inequalities
- Jessica Pearlman (2014) — The Influence of Technical, Social and Financial Factors on Water Pump Sustainability in Mozambique
- Feng Bill Shi (2012) — Diffusion through Information Networks
- Yueming Xing (2012) — Statistical Analysis of Alumni Donations at UNC
- Luxi Zheng (2010) — Measures of Importance of Nodes in Social Networks
Broader Mentoring
In addition to formal primary supervision, I have served on PhD dissertation committees across a few other departments.