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, as well as my teaching experience and expository notes.

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. Stay tuned for an official posting.

News from the past year

• [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] 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.

• [March 2024] Three posters on our work were presented at Cosyne 2024! I also had the pleasure of speaking at the “Comparative approaches to advance neural circuits and computation” workshop organized by Anqi Zhang and Siddharth Jayakumar.

• [December 2023] I’m presenting three papers at NeurIPS 2023! Check out our work with Paul Masset on models for fast inference in the olfactory bulb, our work with Hamza Chaudhry and Dima Krotov on associative memory for long sequences, and our work on learning curves for models with many layers of structured features. Also check out Hamza’s talk at the AMHN workshop.

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.