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New Faculty Focus: Nicolas Garcia Trillos

He brings interests in math and machine learning to the Department of Statistics.

by Katie Vaughn November 9, 2018
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Nicolas Garcia Trillos

Title: Assistant Professor in the Department of Statistics

Hometown: Born and raised in Bogota, Colombia

Educational and professional background:  

I obtained my undergraduate degree in mathematics from Los Andes University in Bogota, Colombia. In 2010 I moved to Pittsburgh to begin my PhD program in mathematical sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. I got my PhD during the spring of 2015 and then moved to Providence, Rhode Island, where I joined the Division of Applied Mathematics at Brown University as a Prager assistant professor; this was a three-year postdoctoral position.  

How did you get into your field of research? 

My research area is interdisciplinary and involves mathematics, statistics and machine learning. However, at the beginning there was only math for me, and this combination of topics was unsuspected.

My PhD adviser, Professor Dejan Slepcev, had this vision that many of the tools he knew of from mathematical analysis could be used to answer questions that came from machine learning. He was very excited about the prospect, but was straightforward in saying that embarking on such a project was risky (the risk of entering an unknown territory in an unknown discipline). Taking a more undiscovered path was very attractive to me. I started working on the project motivated by my adviser’s motivation.

What attracted you to UW-Madison? 

Its excellence in the fields of statistics and mathematics. I should also mention as a fun fact that UW-Madison received some attention in Colombia very recently, since one of the main candidates of the last presidential elections got his PhD in mathematics from UW-Madison. Yes, he was a mathematician running for president and he almost made it to the second round where, given the political map, he could have probably won the presidency. 

What was your first visit to campus like?  

It was for my job interview, the first week of February of this year. I flew to Madison with my wife the weekend before the interview and it was unusually warm for the winter season. One of my now colleagues, Professor Wei Yin Loh, gave us a tour around campus and took us to the top of a hill from where we could see the frozen Mendota lake; I had never seen a frozen body of water of that size in my life.

The second time I visited Madison was for apartment hunting. From that trip I remember thinking that the food trucks on State Street were great, inexpensive and diverse. We sat in the Memorial Union Terrace and listened to one of the open mic performances while we saw the sun go down.

What’s one thing you hope students who take a class with you will come away with?

I want my students to learn to love learning. I want them to be driven and passionate about what they do. 

What’s something interesting about your area of expertise you can share that will make us sound smarter at parties? 

I would simply say that math is the language of the universe... and I have always been told that it is good to learn languages to be able to understand each other. If you are at a party with a more utilitarian crowd then simply say that statistics is the discipline of the present and future.

Hobbies/other interests:  

I like to play tennis and soccer. I also like to read fiction books, especially when they are well-thought presents (I have a bunch of friends who like to give me books because of x, y or z). I like to watch my wife paint, to just lie down on a couch and see her put layer after layer of oil on a canvas while listening to music; sometimes I pose for her.