About Me

I am a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows, an affiliate of the Harvard Center for Brain Science, and a recipient of a 2024 NIH Director’s Early Independence Award. My research interests lie in some neighborhood of the intersection between theoretical neuroscience, statistical physics, and machine learning. For more information about me and my work, see some of my recent publications and lecture notes, or my CV.

News from the past year

• [September 2025] I’m headed to the ROC(K)IN’ AI 2.0 workshop, where I’ll speak about our work on generalized cross-validation in high-dimensional ridge regression with correlated samples.

• [August 2025] Our perspective on summary statistics of learning—and what lessons the statistical physics of learning might have for the analysis of neural data—has just been published.

• [August 2025] I’m speaking at the 2025 Brains, Minds, and Machines Summer Course at the Woods Hole MBL.

• [May 2025] Our paper with Alex Atanasov on high-dimensional ridge regression with correlated training data was accepted to ICML 2025. M Ganesh Kumar’s paper on reorganization of place field representations was also accepted.

• [March 2025] Five posters on our work were presented at Cosyne 2025!

• [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.

See older news here.

I can also (rarely) 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.