Ilias Zadik

Yale University,
Department of Statistics and Data Science.

Contact: ilias.zadik at yale.edu
Links to: CV (last update 10/23/22), Google Scholar, arXiv.

headshot
About me

I am an Assistant Professor at Yale University, in the Department of Statistics and Data Science.

I am searching for highly motivated PhD students. If you are interested to work with me, apply to our PhD program and mention my name.

Currently teaching (Sping 2025): S&DS 351: Stochastic Processes

Research Interests
My research lies broadly in the interface of high dimensional statistics, the theory of machine learning, the theory of computation, and probability theory. A lot of my work has the goal to build and use mathematical tools to bring insights into the computational and statistical challenges of modern machine learning tasks. Four directions that I have been recently focusing on are:

  • Computational-statistical trade-offs in inference (e.g., see papers 4, 20, 22, 25, 28, 33, 35 below).
  • Phase transition phenomena (e.g. the "All-or-Nothing phenomenon") (e.g., see papers 11, 17, 26, 37 below).
  • Connections between statistics and cryptographic methods (e.g, see papers 7, 18, 20, 29, 30 below).
  • The cost of (differential) privacy in statistics (e.g, see papers 6, 14 below).


Short Bio (prior to current position)
From September 2021 to August 2023 I was a postdoctoral researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Mathematics Department, where I worked under the wonderful mentorship of Elchanan Mossel and Nike Sun, as a member of the NSF/Simons program Collaboration on the Theoretical Foundations of Deep Learning.
Prior to this, from September 2019 to August 2021 I was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Data Science of New York University and a member of it's Math and Data (MaD) group.
I received my PhD on September 2019 from the Operations Research Center of MIT , where I was very fortunate to be advised by Prof. David Gamarnik. A copy of my PhD thesis can be found here.
From June 2017 to August 2017 I was an intern at the Microsoft Research Lab in New England, mentored by Jennifer Chayes and Christian Borgs . Prior joining MIT, I completed a Master of Advanced Studies in Mathematics (Part III of the Mathematical Tripos) at the University of Cambridge and a BA in Mathematics from the Mathematics Department at the University of Athens.
Some recorded talks