Nicolas Garcia Trillos obtained his bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from Los Andes University in Bogotá, Colombia, in 2010 and his Ph.D. in Mathematical Sciences from Carnegie Mellon University in 2015. From 2015 to 2018, he spent his postdoctoral years as a Prager Assistant Professor at Brown University. He is joining the Department of Statistics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison as an Assistant Professor. Garcia Trillos likes to read short stories, play soccer and tennis, make pottery, go on walks through city streets and forests, spend time with his wife, and watch her put color on her canvases. He is the recipient of the 2016 Aranda Ordaz award for his thesis work. He is also the recipient of Pearson's Foundation Digital Storymakers award for coauthoring the non-fiction story "Miguel"about a potion-making recycler in Bogotá.
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Broadly speaking, Nicolas Garcia Trillos's main academic interests lie in the fields of applied analysis, computational probability and statistics,and machine learning; his academic background is a mixture of mathematical analysis and statistics. More specifically, one of his main lines of research lies at the intersection of calculus of variations, optimal transport, and PDEs, and studies the connection between graph-based techniques for learning and continuum problems modelled by PDEs and calculus of variations; Dr. Garcia's work has developed mathematical tools to study large sample asymptotics for such graph-based problems and has studied some of the computational implications of this analysis. Another of his lines of research involves the use of Bayesian methods for inference and MCMC computingin the context of uncertainty quantification for problems arising in physics and engineering. Garcia appreciates theoretical,methodological and computational works, and is interested in further developing the rigorous mathematical foundations for the fields of data analysis and machine learning.

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“As with any heritage celebration, Hispanic Heritage Month celebrates the past(what gives us our background), but it also speaks to us about our present and the responsibility we have in molding the future. For me,this celebration is an opportunity to encourage young students allover Latin America to get involved in fields of study that require creativity, dedication, and passion: from the arts to the sciences.It is also a reminder of the task we all have in pushing for enough support (of all kinds) for young students so that the latent talent that exists in our community can flourish. “

-Nicolas Garcia Trillos

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