People

Running the month

Who to ask

All of us are in #intensive-november. Anything you would rather not put in a channel goes to Leonard, or through anonymous feedback.

This cohort

Who's who

• 

  Adrián Franco Rubio

  critical_exponent

  PhD in theoretical quantum physics in 2020, currently a researcher in quantum many-body theory at the Complutense University of Madrid.
• 

  Alexandr Grebennikov

  alexgrebennikov_16021

  Third-year math PhD student at ISTA, in the area of probabilistic combinatorics. Confident in probability and linear algebra; can code; have almost no ML experience.
• 

  Alexandre Porro

  graduated from Master2 in sorbonne in paris (fundamental math), worked as AI engineer and software engineer for years before getting more interested and involved in EA community and AI safety. Just completed ML4Good bootcamp and work on a workshop for mathematicians at my former university to get them more interested in AI safety.
• 

  Alexey Kravatskiy

  MIPT BSc in Applied Mathematics and Physics graduate; MIPT MSc in Computer Science student; independent researcher in optimization methods, deep learning theory, and AI for mathematics; SURF 2026 intern at INSAIT.
• 

  Alp Muyesser

  alpmuyesser_83426_60523

  Research Fellow at Oxford
• 

  Andreas C Schneider

  andreasschneider

  I did my PhD in physics at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization in Göttingen, Germany. My work focused on emergence in networks: I used information theory to define what individual neurons are trying to achieve locally, and asked how those local goals combine into coherent behaviour at the level of the whole network. Coming from physics, what drew me was the general question underneath: when does a collection of components become something with its own dynamics and its own goals, and conversely, how can a global goal be decomposed into local ones without the components becoming misaligned with it.
• 

  Andrew Mendelsohn

  a196884

  Postdoctoral researcher in post-quantum cryptography at Imperial College London
• 

  Antonio AcuavivaFellow

  ahacua4993

  I am a final-year PhD student in Mathematics at Lancaster University, working in functional analysis, particularly Banach space theory and operator theory. Before starting my PhD, I studied Mathematics and Physics in Madrid and completed Part III at Cambridge.
• 

  Arman Darbinyan

  armand_02200

  I received my PhD in pure mathematics from Vanderbilt University in 2018. Afterward, I held visiting positions at ENS Paris, Texas A&M, The Ohio State University, IHES. Since 2023, I'm a lecturer in pure math (equivalent to an assistant professor) at the University of Southampton. My research so far was primarily in geometric and algorithmic group theory, with connections to computability theory and computational complexity theory.
• 

  August Willoughby

  augustwilloughby_54430

  Undergraduate Mathematics student at Macquarie University in Sydney; main research interests include category theory, and its applications to mechanistic interpretability and machine learning theory generally. Recently, I developed a gradient-based circuit discovery in language models called Espalier, which culminated in a paper accepted to the NeurIPS 2026 Interpretability as a Science workshop. I'll also be undertaking a research studentship at CSIRO over the Australian summer after the Iliad Intensive.
• 

  Ayub Kharel

  transientform

  BSc + MSc Mathematics Current DPhil candidate at University of Oxford, Statistics Department Area of research: learning theory, reinforcement learning, AI alignment
• 

  Barinder Singh BanwaitFellow

  barinder0501

  My academic work has been in number theory and arithmetic geometry, areas of pure mathematics. I've mostly worked with elliptic curves over number fields, and computational aspects of this. I've worked on large datasets arising in the Langlands program, contributed to open-source computer algebra systems, and have 12 peer-reviewed publications and a few preprints currently under review.
• 

  Berend van Tol

  berend03504

  I am a mathematician specialized in probability theory. The past years I've been working on interacting particle systems and non-equilibrium statistical mechanics.
• 

  Bruno Scalzo

  brunoscalzo_90750

  I’m a quantitative researcher with a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Imperial College London, focused on tensor decompositions for signal processing. I previously worked at Citadel and will be joining Hudson River Trading after my current non-compete. My interests include computational game theory and dynamic programming.
• 

  Cheng Chen

  nozomi20

  I am a fifth-year Mathematics PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, advised by Jose Israel Rodriguez, whose work spans applied algebraic geometry, likelihood geometry, and algebraic statistics. My research is in neuroalgebraic geometry focusing on phase transitions in how learning systems form knowledge, and on how capabilities emerge as the geometry of the loss landscape changes. I expect to finish my PhD in 2027. My goal is to bring this mathematical perspective to AI safety and alignment, specifically to understanding what models learn, how they learn it, and when that learning changes qualitatively.
• 

  Chuqiao Lin

  lccqqqqq

  Previously quantum game theory, quantum many-body physics and quantum information. Mechanistic Interpretability since last year, Singular learning theory/Computation mechanics approach to AI alignment recently.
• CS

  Connor Simpson

  I have worked mainly on developing connections between algebraic geometry & combinatorics, especially pertaining to hyperplane arrangements, matroids, and reflection groups.
• 

  Deshuo Liu

  Deshuo Liu’s academic background is in theoretical physics. He graduated with honours in Physics with Theoretical Physics from the University of Manchester in 2021, then pursued an MSc in Quantum Fields and Fundamental Forces at Imperial College London, submitting his dissertation on supersymmetric field theories in 2022 under Professor Amihay Hanany. He is currently listed as a PhD student in Imperial’s theoretical physics group. His research focuses on supersymmetric gauge theories and the geometry of their moduli spaces—the mathematical spaces describing possible vacuum states. His work explores Higgs and Coulomb branches, quiver gauge theories, discrete symmetries, and symplectic singularities, connecting quantum field theory with algebraic and symplectic geometry.
• 

  Djordje Mihajlovic

  djdjdjordje

  Penultimate mathematics PhD student at the University of Edinburgh studying how neural networks learn problems in low-dimensional topology.
• 

  Emily Autumn Windes

  rinakra

  I graduated with a PhD in pure math from the University of Oregon in Spring, 2025. From Fall 2025-Spring 2026 I worked as a professor in pure math at New Uzbekistan University. Up until now, my research has been in gauge theory in higher dimensions and calibrated geometry.
• 

  Enmei Yang

  Current undergraduate at MIT studying math and CS
• 

  Filippo Torresan

  fil.inf.373

  Filippo Torresan received his Ph.D. in Cognitive Science from the University of Sussex (Brighton, UK). He has research interests in the philosophy of cognitive science and in various mathematical and computational frameworks to understand intelligence and consciousness in natural and artificial agents, with a special focus on reinforcement learning and active inference. In the past year, he has been a research advisor for Araya Inc.
• 

  George Coote

  georgefactorial

  I am a fourth year PhD student looking at questions of computability in spectral theory. My research is in two parts: first, I use computable reductions to find lower bounds to the difficulty of spectral problems. Informed by these reductions, I look at what additional assumptions can be placed on the input operator to lower this difficulty. This process produces theoretically verified algorithms to solve spectral problems, with a strong theory around when they break down.
• 

  Guangyi ZouFellow

  guangyizou_21825

  I am a second-year PhD student in Mathematics at UC Irvine, advised by Roman Vershynin. My background is in probability and random matrix theory, with current work on high-dimensional probability, universality, and inhomogeneous random matrices. Before joining UCI, I completed my B.S. and M.S. in Mathematics at the University of Science and Technology of China. More recently, I have been exploring the mathematical foundations of machine learning and AI safety, especially how tools from probability and geometry can contribute to theoretical questions in these areas.
• 

  Hang Lu Su

  homeowmorphism

  I completed my PhD in Mathematics at ICMAT in Madrid, supported by a Marie Skłodowska-Curie and “la Caixa” Foundation co-funded fellowship. My recent work focuses on mathematical formalization, which led me to recently finish a summer academic visit with Kevin Buzzard’s group at Imperial College London, where I worked on the AnnalsChallenge project. I hold a BSc (Honours) in Mathematics with a minor in Computer Science from McGill University.
• 

  Ihor Kendiukhov

  ikendiukhov

  I hold bachelor's degrees in economics and biology, and master's degrees in mathematics and bioinformatics. I have around 20 academic publications spanning mostly AI for biology and mechanistic interpretability.
• 

  Jean-Luc Portner

  jlportner

  Jean-Luc Portner is a final-year DPhil student in pure mathematics at the University of Oxford, supervised by Erik Panzer and Francis Brown, where he works on Feynman integrals, graph cohomology and multiple zeta values. Before Oxford, he completed his BSc and MSc at ETH Zurich, graduating as valedictorian. Outside research, he enjoys sports, including organising the Oxford City Race, an orienteering race through the Oxford colleges with 500 participants. He is now moving into AI safety, aiming to bring his mathematical background to theoretical alignment research.
• 

  Jingqiu Ding

  jingqiuding_89520

  A postdoc in theoretical computer science department studying trustworthy ml
• 

  Junkang Li

  junkang_li

  Computer scientist and researcher in Game Theory and AI, with a background in theoretical computer science, maths, and physics: PhD in CS (defended in 2023), M.S. in Applied Mathematics (Maths for Machine Learning; 2019), M.S. in Theoretical Physics (2018).
• 

  Kelly Maggs

  keel0648

  I did a PhD in algebraic topology at EPFL before moving into mathematical biology for a post-doc at the Max Planck Institute for Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden. I am currently a post-doc in the Topological Data Analysis group at Oxford.
• 

  Kieran Lelis

  kierunlel

  Mathematics Bachelor Honours Degree at ANU, Current mathematics PhD student at UNSW Canberra.
• 

  Konstanze Rietsch

  konni0102

  I studied Mathematics at UG/Masters level at the University of Vienna, and then did a PhD at MIT. I am now a Professor in the Geometry Group at King's College London.
• 

  Lee Berry

  leeberry9043

  I recently graduated with a PhD in Mathematics from King's College London, where I was based in the Number Theory research group. Prior to that, I completed a master’s degree at King's College and a bachelor's degree at the University of Groningen, both in mathematics.
• 

  Ludovico Morellato

  ludolas

  Doctoral candidate in Mathematics, I study knot theory theoretical problems applying machine learning methods
• 

  Mads Christensen

  mads_08525

  Postdoc in pure mathematics at Max Planck Institute for Mathematics Bonn. Subject automorphic forms
• 

  Malcolm Jones

  malcolmjones

  I completed my PhD in pure mathematics in 2024 in the Operator Algebra group at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. My research focuses on links between generalisations of directed graphs, restriction semigroups, inverse semigroups, semicategories and groupoids as models of algebras and C*-algebras.
• 

  Marcel Wack

  sequenzer_0

  PhD graduate in Discrete Mathematics from TU Berlin. Research background in computational polyhedral geometry and quantum information theory, with a focus on computer algebra and machine learning for mathematical research.
• 

  Marie Abadie

  I hold a Bachelor of Science and a Master of Science in Mathematics from EPFL (Switzerland), completed in February 2023. Currently, I am a PhD Candidate in Mathematics at the University of Luxembourg, where my research area lies between geometry, topology and chaotic dynamical systems.
• 

  Marios Tsatsos

  marios02610

  I am quantum physicist and data scientist with published research in computational quantum mechanics, complex systems and many-body interacting ultracold gases and most recently in mechanistic interpretability and AI safety. I have worked in Europe, North and South America in institutes like Heidelberg University, Los Alamos National Lab, UMass, Sao Paulo, Web of Science and more. I have published more than 15 peer reviewed papers with 1,000+ citations. I am also an entrepreneur and 3x founder.
• 

  Neel Agrawal

  okrackle

  Second-year undergraduate in Joint Mathematics and Computing (BEng) at Imperial College London, graduating 2028.
• 

  Neeraj Deshmukh

  shambhavopaya

  I am mathematician employed as a Limited term assistant professor at the University of Georgia. My research lies in the intersection of algebraic geometry and homotopy theory. The word "motive" appears a lot.
• 

  Nicola Alboré

  nicola_albore

  Theoretical physicist with expertise in statistical mechanics, physics of disordered systems, and biological neural networks modeling.
• 

  Nicola Da Ponte

  enne24

  I am a PhD student in mathematics in SISSA. I have been working in spectral geometry and integral geometry for the last 2 years. I am also part of the real geometry research group in SISSA.
• 

  Nikolay Barashkov

  I studied mathematics at the University in Bonn from 2012-2018. I then went on to complete a PH.D there in Probability and Mathematical Physics, under the supervision of Max Gubinelli. After a subsequent Posdoctoral stay at the University of Helsinki I became a research Group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences, Leipzig.
• 

  Nina ZubrilinaFellow

  astroninja123_79722

  My mathematical research is in statistical properties of modular forms. I am also interested in sphere packing, Ramanujan graphs, and other related problems
• 

  Noam Tamarin

  noam.tamarin

  I recently completed a PhD in mathematical physics at Instituto Superior Técnico (University of Lisbon). Before that, I completed my undergraduate degree at UCL and a master’s degree at Imperial College London. My academic background is primarily in mathematical and theoretical physics, with my PhD research focusing on problems in resurgence theory and its applications to string theory.
• 

  Ondřej Kubů

  ondrejkubu

  I am a mathematical physicist, a Severo Ochoa Postdoctoral Fellow at ICMAT in Madrid until October 2026. My research is on integrable and superintegrable systems, particularly in the presence of magnetic fields, using Haantjes and Nijenhuis geometry. I did my PhD in Mathematical Physics at the Czech Technical University in Prague (2024); the thesis received the Rector's Award for Excellent Doctoral Thesis 2025.
• 

  Pablo Sala de Torres-Solanot

  pablosala_87369

  I hold a PhD in theoretical physics, and I recently joined the Institute of Theoretical Physics in Madrid as a Ramón y Cajal fellow. I study many-body systems (both classical and quantum), in particular how complex emergent phenomena arise from microscopic interacting degrees of freedom. I also study how information spreads in these systems and investigate efficient protocols to recover it. I am currently interested in mechanistic interpretability, and I am working on analytically tractable models to study emergence and the learning dynamics of neural networks. My research work combines mathematical and analytical methods with numerical calculations.
• 

  Pierre GodfardFellow

  pierregodfard_41216

  I completed a PhD in quantum topology and algebraic geometry at Sorbonne University in 2025. After that, I spent 1 year at UNC Chapel Hill for a postdoc.
• 

  Pyuyi Chufeng Huang

  pyuyi233

  I have a background in mathematics from Sichuan University, where my undergraduate training focused on fundamental mathematics and mathematical reasoning. I am currently pursuing doctoral studies in AI Security, while my research interests are mainly centered on artificial intelligence, particularly large language models, causal reasoning, interpretability, AI alignment, reinforcement learning and agent systems. My work often combines mathematical and theoretical perspectives with empirical studies and I am especially interested in understanding the mechanisms behind modern AI systems and developing more principled methods for their reasoning, learning, and adaptation.
• 

  Raimundo SaonaFellow

  rasa200

  I was born and raised in Chile, where I studied mathematical Engineering, with focus on Probability and Optimal Control. During my master, I worked on Optimal Stopping problems and was introduced to Game Theory. Later, during my PhD in Austria, I worked in the intersection of Game Theory and Computer Science. Lastly, I moved one year ago to London to work at London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).
• 

  Raquel Fernández Peralta

  raquelfernandez_77155

  I have a PhD in mathematics from the University of the Balearic Islands in Spain, where my research focused on logical operators in many-valued logic, mostly studied through functional equations. I'm currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Mathematical Institute of the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava. Alongside the theoretical work, I also do machine learning research on interpretability and uncertainty quantification, with the aim of understanding what a model is doing and how far its predictions can be trusted.
• 

  Rida Ait El Manssour

  mysterious_raccoon_68753

  I hold a PhD in mathematics specialising in differential algebra, and I have three years of postdoc research experience in computer science. First at IRIF in Paris, and second at the university of Oxford. My research lies at the intersection of algebra, automata theory and program verification. In particular polynomial invariants and matrix semigroups.
• 

  Roktim Mascharak

  roktim4196

  I am an Algebraic Geometere by training. I did my Undergrad (Presidency Unversity, Kolkata) and Masters (TIFR, Mumbai) in Mathematics in India. Currently I am a final year PhD student at the London school of Geometry and Number Theory. My primary area of interest is Birational Geometry and it's applications on the theory of foliation (which are objects which capture the data of differential equations on algebraic varieties).
• 

  Roman Malov

  lambdasaturn

  Masters degree in general and applied physics
• 

  Sam Silver

  catofbread

  Current mathematics PhD student at UCL working in algebraic geometry.
• 

  Santiago Cifuentes

  santicifu

  I am a theoretical computer scientist based in Buenos Aires. I am in the final year of my PhD at UBA, where I use ideas from theoretical computer science to approach foundational questions in quantum computing, mainly through computational complexity and Kolmogorov complexity. In recent years, I have also begun transitioning into AI safety, largely through a fellowship at Dovetail, where I work on agentic foundations. Lately I've been trying to understand the structure and properties of world models, mainly abstracting them using transducers.
• 

  Sayantan Roy Chowdhury

  sayantanrc.

  I hold a PhD in Mathematics from Western University, Canada, with research at the intersection of algebraic geometry and representation theory. My doctoral work focused on derived categories of generalized Severi–Brauer varieties and the essential dimension of the moduli of symplectic bundles over curves. I completed my undergraduate studies at the Chennai Mathematical Institute, and my broader research interests include moduli spaces, Higgs bundles, and geometric approaches to questions arising in mathematical physics and AI theory.
• 

  Shaun AllisonFellow

  I spent about a decade in academia as a mathematician studying descriptive set theory, which measures the complexity of many natural objects in mathematics much like complexity theory. I also have done some work lately with formalizing mathematics in Lean. I recently decided to pivot to AI safety work.
• 

  Simone Rota

  simonerota41

  I earned my bachelor's and master's degrees in physics, both cum laude, specializing in theoretical and particle physics. I then completed a three-year PhD in Physics at the University of Milan (UNIMI), where my research focused on Quantum Field Theory, in particular exact computations and universality in strongly coupled theories. I am currently in the final year of a three-year postdoctoral position at SISSA (Trieste), where I have continued these lines of research and extended them to lattice structures, defects, and algorithmic methods.
• 

  Sofía Marlasca Aparicio

  queer_homology

  I have just completed a PhD in derived algebraic geometry at the University of Oxford. I have decided to leave pure maths academia and spent the summer as a Quantitative Researcher Intern at Susquehanna, which gave me an opportunity to do more quantitative work. This involved making various mathematical models and working on machine learning professionally for the first time. I am fairly self taught for both programming and machine learning, other than my experience this summer as a Quantitative Researcher. I am keen to learn more to direct my career towards more quantitative roles.
• 

  Stefan Ludescher

  _stefan_93

  I completed my PhD in quantum foundations at IQOQI Vienna in December 2025 and remained there as a postdoctoral researcher until the end of April 2026. My research focused on exploring the fundamental properties of quantum theory and understanding what makes it unique. Much of my work investigated how symmetry principles constrain quantum theory and even more general probabilistic theories. For my investigations, I applied methods from mathematical physics. This equipped me with a strong background in a variety of mathematical disciplines, including linear algebra, group theory, representation theory, functional analysis (especially the theory of C*-algebras), and probability theory, among others.
• 

  Theodor Iosif

  theodoriosif_62456

  I am currently enrolled as a doctoral student at University College London, exploring potential advantages in structured ML, classical or quantum. With a background in Mathematical Physics (condensed matter and quantum information in particular), I am excited to explore the mathematical formalism of AI Alignment and get to meet the other participants as well as experts in the field!
• 

  Vasu Tewari

  vasutewari_80975

  I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematical and Computational Sciences at the University of Toronto (Mississauga). Prior to this I was an Assistant Professor at the University of Hawaii, which in joined after postdocs at University of Pennsylvania and the University of Washington. I obtained my PhD in Mathematics from the University of British Columbia in 2015, while I graduated with a Bachelors in Computer Science in India. I work broadly in Algebraic Combinatorics.
• 

  Vicente Opazo

  visho33

  I studied Applied Mathematics at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, where I became interested in theoretical computer science and optimization. That naturally led me into machine learning, especially its theoretical side. I was also part of the university’s competitive programming club, which got me very interested in algorithms and problem solving. I currently do research at the National Center for Artificial Intelligence (CENIA), mainly around theoretical machine learning and computational complexity.
• 

  Victor Roca i Lucio

  victorroca.

  Currently I'm a Postdoc in Maths, working in homotopy theory, algebraic geometry and game theory.
• 

  William Ford

  vvill6250

  Originally from England, I am a second-year mathematics PhD candidate jointly at École Polytechnique and Université Paris-Saclay. My research focuses on the stability properties of the optimal transport problem, with applications in machine learning, computer vision, statistics and numerical analysis. Before my PhD, I completed an M2 master in Optimisation also at Ecole Polytechnique, and before that I was at Durham University in the north of england, for a BSc and MSc in mathematics.
• 

  Ylias Sadki

  ilyaki.

  PhD in Theoretical Physics
• 

  Zaer Bin Zaqy

  zaikia

  Duke University Undergraduate studying Mathematics and Computer Science
• 

  Zerui Tan

  eiko_chan

  I am a PhD candidate in pure mathematics working in number theory. I have interest in theoretical foundations of AI modelling, with a structuralist intepretation. Alongside research, I build an agent harness in Haskell and write educational material in abstract algebra and probability.

Teaching this month

Teachers and TAs

Reach out to them on Discord if you want to talk about their module or their research. They are here because they want to have those conversations.