Miklos Z. Racz
Assistant Professor • Statistics & Data Science
Assistant Professor • Computer Science
Northwestern University


2006 Sheridan Rd, Room 108
Evanston, IL 60208
miklos dot racz at northwestern dot edu

[ CV | Google Scholar profile ]


Brief bio

I am an Assistant Professor at Northwestern University with a joint appointment in the Department of Statistics and Data Science and the Department of Computer Science. I am also affiliated with the IDEAL Institute. My research interests lie broadly at the interface of probability, statistics, computer science, and information theory.

Before joining Northwestern, I was an assistant professor at Princeton University in the ORFE Department, as well as an associated faculty member at the Center for Statistics and Machine Learning (CSML). Previously, I spent two years as a postdoc in the Theory Group at Microsoft Research, Redmond. I received my PhD in Statistics from UC Berkeley in 2015, where I was advised by Elchanan Mossel. I also obtained an MS in Computer Science from Berkeley. Before that, I received an MS in Mathematics from the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, under the supervision of Márton Balázs and Bálint Tóth.

Research interests

My research interests lie broadly at the interface of probability, statistics, computer science, and information theory. My work focuses on combinatorial statistics: inference questions on large random discrete structures such as random graphs. These include inferring the past in randomly growing graphs, inferring latent geometry in high-dimensional random geometric graphs, graph matching problems in correlated random graphs, and community detection. I am also interested in, and have worked on, social networks, dynamics on networks, voting, sequence reconstruction, and DNA data storage.

Teaching

In Winter 2024 I am teaching the graduate course STAT 430-2: Probability for Statistical Inference 2.

Students

One of the best parts of being an academic is the opportunity to interact with and to mentor talented students. It is a pleasure to currently advise:

(PhD) Shuwen Chai (Northwestern Computer Science), Jifan Zhang (Northwestern Statistics)
(Undergraduate) Seung Hee Daniel Lee (Northwestern Computer Science), Sophia Pi (Northwestern Computer Science), Lisa Saltzberg (Northwestern Computer Science), Ali Slayie (Northwestern Data Science), Wei Sun (Northwestern Computer Science & Psychology)

Previously, I advised the PhD of Suqi Liu (PhD 2022, Princeton ORFE → postdoc at Harvard), Daniel Rigobon (PhD 2023, Princeton ORFE → lecturer at Princeton), and Anirudh Sridhar (PhD 2023, Princeton ECE → postdoc at MIT). For a full list of former students and more, see the Students tab.