CV

Sébastien Roch is a Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he is also affiliated with the Department of Statistics, the Theory of Computing Group and the Institute for Foundations of Data Science.

He earned his Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of California, Berkeley under the guidance of Elchanan Mossel. From 2007-2009, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher at Microsoft Research. From 2009-2012, he was a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of California-Los Angeles.

He is the recipient of an NSF CAREER Award and of an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship. He also received the Best Paper Award at RECOMB 2018. He was a Kavli Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences in 2014 and 2017, and a 2018 Simons Fellow. He is also a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS) and gave an IMS Medallion Lecture in 2024. He is currently on the Executive Committee of the NSF TRIPODS Phase II-funded Institute for Foundations of Data Science. He is also a co-PI on the NSF Research Training Group (RTG) award Mathematics & AI Synergies (MAIS): Algebra and Applications.

His research interests lie at the interface of applied probability, statistics, and theoretical computer science with an emphasis on biological applications. He has published two textbooks: Mathematical Methods in Data Science (Cambridge University Press, 2025) and Modern Discrete Probability (Cambridge University Press, 2024).