About Me

I am a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows, and an affiliate of the Harvard Center for Brain Science. My research interests lie in some neighborhood of the intersection between theoretical neuroscience, statistical physics, and machine learning. For more information about my work, see some of my recent publications, lecture notes, and teaching experience.

I earned my doctorate in physics at Harvard, under the supervision of Cengiz Pehlevan. My thesis considered a few topics in the statistical mechanics of neural networks. Before that, I did my undergraduate work in physics at Yale, where I worked with Damon Clark on visual motion detection and locomotor coordination in fruit flies.

A postdoctoral position is available in my group at the Center for Brain Science. See official posting here.

News from the past year

• [January 2025] Our note on kernel smoothing was published in JSTAT!

• [November 2024] In response to a question from Binxu Wang, I’ve written an addendum to my lecture notes on the replica trick for the extreme eigenvalues of a Wishart matrix, which describes the even simpler computation of the log-determinant. Eventually I’ll get around to combining the two computations into one note, but for now this addendum is available here.

• [October 2024] Welcome to Blanche Marion, who is doing her EPFL Master’s Thesis with us and Venki Murthy.

• [October 2024] I have been awarded the 2024 American Physical Society Dissertation Award in Statistical and Nonlinear Physics.

• [October 2024] Two of our papers were featured in the 2024 Machine Learning Special Issue of JSTAT!

• [October 2024] I have received a 2024 NIH Director’s Early Independence Award. See also the blurb in the Harvard Gazette.

• [October 2024] I gave two guest lectures on high-dimensional ridge regression for Harvard AM 226, roughly based on our paper with Alex Atanasov. My lecture notes are available here.

• [September 2024] Our paper with Billy Qian on mechanistic mismatches in data-constrained models for integrator circuits was accepted to NeurIPS 2024.

• [4 April 2024] I’ve defended my thesis! It is available here.

See older news here.

I can also be found on Bluesky or Mastodon. In official contexts I use my full name, so you’ll find me listed as Jacob Andreas Zavatone-Veth.