Life After Davis: From Cameras to Genetics

Hello, UC Davis Math Department! I spent four years at UC Davis and completed my Ph.D. with Thomas Strohmer on applications of Compressive Sensing (CS) in 2009. Due to my previous time spent in industry, I was a non-traditional student. This gave me more focus because I basically knew what I was interested in.  I had experience in electrical engineering and physics, so CS was a good fit for me. (Fun fact: the Math Dept used to be in Kerr Hall. In my second semester we all moved to the newly constructed MSB!)

Our 2009 paper on CS Radar won IEEE Paper of the Year in 2013, and it kind of made my career! It helped me get a postdoc at UCLA, which then got me a job at InView Corp. in Austin, TX. InView was a startup company using CS to build specialty cameras, e.g., the famous "single-pixel camera." InView ultimately folded like many startups, but I learned a lot while working there, especially how to deal with real-world challenges that are ignored when you write a typical applied math paper.

Around 2018, I started working with an ophthalmologist in NYC, who also has a Ph.D. in math. We figured out a way to apply CS to genetics and wrote a paper that was published in 2021. I knew very little about genetics, so it was like getting a second Ph.D.! Soon after, a professor at Yale University cited our paper a few times; we started to email, which led to regular Zoom sessions, and we are now collaborating on new ideas. We recently submitted a paper on how to analyze the statistics of a multi-factor function from its Fourier transform (available on arXiv). The work was motivated by genetics, but has applications in many other areas including business/finance, operations research, voting/choice theory, graph/hypergraph theory, as well as in the sciences and engineering that use traditional Fourier analysis.

Looking back, I'm grateful for pursuing a Ph.D. at UC Davis. It has opened up more doors and opportunities than I could have imagined. I'm now a consultant in industry, but continue to have strong ties to academia. This gives me the freedom to work on the things I'm most interested in and passionate about. I enjoy doing "industrial research," using new ideas from academia to solve important problems in science and society. I take heed in Richard Hamming's philosophy: while at Bell Labs he would ask others "What are the most important problems in your field? Are you working on them? If not, why?"

... Oh yeah, Austin has a great music scene - I currently play drums and percussion with Austin Samba!