Ellen Persson
I am a 3rd year Ph.D. Candidate in Mathematics at New York University's Courant Institute, under the co-supervision of Georg Stadler and Jonathan Weare. My research is broadly focused on rare event simulation in physical systems, with applications ranging from glaciology to turbulence and fluid models.
Education
- Ph.D. in Mathematics, New York University (2023 - Present)
- B.S. in Engineering Mathematics and Statistics, UC Berkeley (2022)
Publications
- Szymanski, N.J., Fu, S., Persson, E. et al. Integrated analysis of X-ray diffraction patterns and pair distribution functions for machine-learned phase identification. npj Comput Mater 10, 45 (2024).
Research & Projects
- Temporal Difference Methods for Fluid Dynamics: I am currently working on developing a framework which integrates neural networks with temporal difference methods to compute statistical properties of physical systems. I also contribute source code to GeophysicalFlows.jl, an open-source Julia library for fluid modeling.
- Computational Methods for Rare Events: I also study tipping point behavior in glaciology models using adjoint-based automatic differentiation to quantify the sensitivity of ice sheet retreat to unknown parameters.
Undergraduate Research
- Congressional Graph Theory: Under the supervision of Professor Tony Harkin at RIT, I designed a graph theoretical framework using Python, R, and SQL to study the US Congress and presented research results at the 2022 Joint Math Meetings.
- NLP in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary: Through the UC Berkeley Data Science Discovery Program, I studied governmental censorship in 19th-century French literature using logistic regression, natural language processing, and neural networks.
Teaching
New York University
- Section Leader, Principles of Data Science I (Fall 2025, Spring 2026)
- Tutor, Numerical Computing (Spring 2025)
- Grader, Optimization and Computational Linear Algebra (Fall 2024)
UC Berkeley
- Instructor, Data 8: Foundations of Data Science (Summer 2022)
- Head Teaching Assistant (Course Director), Data 8 (Fall 2021, Spring 2022)
- Head Teaching Assistant (Logistics Lead), Data 8 (Spring 2021)
- Teaching Assistant, Data 8 (Fall 2020)
- Tutor, Data 8 (Fall 2019, Spring 2020, Summer 2020)
Awards & Honors
- Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor, UC Berkeley
- Highest Honors (Top 3%), UC Berkeley
- Dean's List, UC Berkeley
Fun Facts :)
- I speak Swedish!
- I play Ultimate Frisbee.
- I love tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons.
- I am an avid crafter, specifically crocheting and knitting!
Additional projects and code can be found on my GitHub.