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 on leave (Fall 2025).

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.
Group (PhD students)
Some recorded talks