blake (dot) woodworth (at) gwu (dot) edu
I am starting as an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at George Washington University in August 2023. I will be accepting PhD students interested in optimization and machine learning. All admissions decisions will happen through the standard GWU application process, so if you are interested, please apply here. Once you have applied, please feel free to send me an email so that I know to look out for your application.
The primary focus of my research is on the theory of optimization, with a particular emphasis on precisely understanding convex, non-convex, and distributed optimization algorithms. I have also been very interested in efforts to understand modern, highly overparametrized machine learning models through the lens of implicit regularization. During my PhD, I also had the opportunity to work on fairness in ML and on adaptive data analysis.
From October 2021-June 2023, I was a postdoctoral researcher with the SIERRA team at Inria, working with Francis Bach, and before that, I was a PhD student in computer science at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (TTIC) advised by Nati Srebro until I graduated in Summer 2021. Before TTIC, I studied at Yale University where I received a B.S. in computer science, advised by Dan Spielman. At Yale, my coursework was spread evenly across the computer science, mathematics, and statistics departments; I was also a peer tutor for several programming-intensive computer science courses.
From September 2017-July 2019 I was supported by a NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, and from July 2019-August 2021, I was supported by a Google PhD Fellowship in machine learning.
Last Updated: March 31, 2023