Sam Rosen

Originally from Maryland, I came to UMass Amherst to study Mathematics and Computer Science. Afterwards, I joined the statistics department at Duke where I recently completed my PhD, advised by Jason Xu. I have been fortunate enough to pursue opportunities at General Dynamics Mission Systems, Johns Hopkins University: Applied Physics Lab, DraftKings, and Datadog. After undergrad and during my PhD, I was a research and development intern at Genentech working on the Epiviz project and a machine learning intern at Cruise and Pinterest.

During my PhD, I did research on the intersection of convex optimization and statistics. In particular, I studied theoretical properties of convex clustering, including the effect of affinity hyperparameters on solution quality, and expanding convex clustering to sparse biclusterable data. In addition, I examined how techniques from convex optimization could be used to sample from posteriors restricted to constrained spaces.

Research Interests