Thesis and applied math project students

PhD Students

• Hannah Friedman, UC Berkeley, co-advising with B. Sturmfels.

• Yulia Alexandr, UC Berkeley, From Voronoi Cells to Algebraic Statistics, December 2023 (co-advised with B. Sturmfels).

-- Yulia is a Hedrick Assistant Adjunct Professor in the Mathematics Department at UCLA (Jan 2024 - Jun 2026).

• Isabelle Shankar, UC Berkeley, Sums of Squares and Symmetric Polynomials, May 2021.

-- Isabelle is an Assistant Professor in the Mathematics Department at Portland State University. 

Master's Thesis Students

• Largo Luong,  Spring 2026.

• Kristen Dawson,  Summer 2025.

• Gerald Morgan, The Positive Semidefinite Rank of Transportation Polytopes, Fall 2024.

• Valerie Gilbert, Hibi's Theorem for Signed Posets, Spring 2024.

-- Valerie teaches community college in Washington. 

• Aswin Rangasamy Venkatesan, Primary Decomposition of Adjacent Minors and Tensor, Summer 2023.

-- Aswin is a PhD student in Mathematics at the University of Kentucky.

• Michael Roark,  Formal Verification of Neural Networks via Optimization Methods, Fall 2022.

-- Michael is an independent data scientist / ML engineer.

• Ayush Bharadwaj, Critical Points of Deep Linear Networks in C^n, Fall 2022.

-- Ayush is an independent data scientist. 

• Matthew Heid, (Symmetry-adapted) Gram Spectrahedra of Binary Forms, Summer 2021.

-- Matt works as Senior Associate Director at the Art of Problem Solving.

• Amira Alkeswani, Algebraic Study of Discrete Imsetal Models, Fall 2020.

• Logan Coe, Sum of Squares Decomposition for Symmetric Polynomial Inequalities, Summer 2017.

-- Logan works as a Data Scientist at Scribd.

• Joshua Rhodes, Computing the Central Sheet in Linear, Quadratic, and Semidefinite Programs, Summer 2016.

-- Joshua is Assistant Professor at College of San Mateo.

• Radoslav Vuchkov, Maximum Likelihood Degree of Various Toric Varieties, Summer 2016.

-- Rado got his PhD  in Applied Mathematics from UC Merced in 2022; he is now a postdoc at Sandia National Lab.

• Daniel Lemke, Maximum Likelihood Estimation and EM Fixed Point Ideals for Binary Tensors, Spring 2016.

-- Daniel works at Synopsys. 

• Jose Tanquilut, Certifying the Existence of Partially Calibrated Epipolar Matrices and Trifocal Tensors, Spring 2016.

-- Jose is a Web Developer. 

• Matthew Simms (co-advised with J. Arsuaga), Building a 3D Yeast Genome Map Using 4C and LP Methods, Fall 2014.

-- Matthew got his PhD in Applied Mathematics and Statistics from UC Santa Cruz in 2018; he is a Senior Data Scientist at Deloitte. 

• Dennis Schlief, Degree of Central Curve in Quadratic Programming, Summer 2014.

-- DJ works as Lecturer at SFSU Mathematics Department. 

• Addie (Evans) Schnirel, Phylogenetic Inference via Algebraic Statistics, Fall 2011.

-- Addie is a Photographer in Riverside, CA. 

• Jonathan Terhorst, The Kalmanson Complex, Spring 2011. 

-- Jonathan got his PhD in Statistics from UC Berkeley in 2017; he is now an Associate Professor in the Statistics Department at U. of Michigan. 

• Tatsiana Maskalevich, Testing Chromosome Proximity Hypothesis Using Log-Linear Models, Spring 2011.

     -- Tatsiana is a Data Science Manager at Netflix. 

• Ashley Shimabuku, Cohen-Macaulayness of Initial Ideals of Normal Toric Ideals, Spring 2011.

-- Ashley is an Instructor at Solano Community College. 

• Ido Heskia, Mathematics, Chromosome Clustering and Algebraic Statistics, Spring 2010.

-- Ido is Senior Product Manager at Canary (canary.is)

• Eric Miranda, Graph Operations in Tropical Geometry, Spring 2010.

-- Eric, sadly, passed away in 2016. 

• Ralf Youtz, Toric Ideals of Small Matroids Are Generated in Degree 2, Spring 2010.

-- Ralf is an Instructor at Portland Community College. 

• Bill Storti, Improving Response Times at SFFD, Fall 2007.

-- Bill is Assistant Chief at San Francisco Fire Department. 

• Kim Seashore (co-advised with F. Ardila and M. Beck), Using Polytopes to Derive Growth Series for Classical Root Lattices, Summer 2007.

-- Kim got her PhD in Mathematics Education from UC Berkeley in 2015; she is now an Associate Professor in the Math Department at SFSU. 

• Leslie Timpe, Tropical Geometry and Construction of Phylogenetic Trees, Spring 2006.

-- Les is an Instructor at SFSU. 

• Alex Milowski, Computing Irredundant Irreducible Decompositions and Scarf Complexes of Large Scale Monomial Ideals, Spring 2004.

-- Alex got his PhD in Computer Science from University of Edinburgh in 2014 and is a Data Platforms Researcher.

• Ian Sammis, 0/1 Contingency Tables and Hierarchical Models, Spring 2003.

-- Ian got his Phd in Mathematics from UC Berkeley in 2009; he is now Software Engineer at Google Inc. 

• Benjamin  Owens, Groebner Bases of Toric Ideals of Matroids, Spring 2002.

• Seth Sullivant, Toric Ideals of Graphical Models in Statistics, Spring 2002.

    -- Seth got his PhD in Mathematics from UC Berkeley in 2005; he is Distinguished Professor of Mathematics and University Faculty Scholar at North Carolina State University. 

• Jon Freedman, Algorithms for Standard Pair Decomposition of Monomial Ideals, Spring 2001.

• Domenico Napoletani (George Mason University), Exponential Geometry, 1999.

-- Domenico got his PhD in Mathematics from George Mason University in 2005; he is Professor at Chapman University. 

Applied Math Project Students (relatively recent)

• Ali Mojabi, Identifying CpG Islands in the Genome Using Hidden Markov Models, 2017.

• Omar Sandoval, Fast Matrix Multiplication, 2015. [Relevant code can be found here]

• Aaron Kosmatin, Chromosome Reconstruction with Mixed Integer Programming, 2014.

• Ren Bettendorf, Iterative Proportional Scaling for Hierarchical Loglinear Models, 2012.

• Ivan Stamenkovic,  The Algebraic Degree of Semidefinite Programming and MAXCUT Problem, 2009.