Leena Chennuru Vankadara
Assistant Professor, Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, University College London
PhD Student, Theory of Machine Learning (Ulrike von Luxburg / Debarghya Ghoshdastidar), Tübingen AI Center
What is your connection to Tübingen, Leena?
I first came to Tübingen in 2017 for my master's thesis with Ulrike von Luxburg, and stayed on as her PhD student from December 2018 to December 2022, co-advised by Debarghya Ghoshdastidar. I worked on kernel methods, high-dimensional statistics, causality, and the theory of overparameterization.
Is there a memory from your time here that had a lasting positive impact on you?
What stays with me most is the integrity that ran through Ulrike's group - in how the science was done, and in how the group was run. Ulrike was careful to protect her students' time and attention so that we could focus on becoming researchers, and the same care ran through the science itself: a quiet, shared sense that doing things the right way mattered more than any individual result. I didn't fully appreciate at the time how rare that is.
Tübingen is my academic home - it shaped not only my research style and the questions I work on, but more importantly the kind of advisor and colleague I try to be.
Leena Chennuru Vankadara
Where has your career taken you since, and did your time in Tübingen play a role? If so, how?
I'm now an Assistant Professor at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at UCL, working on fundamental questions in statistics and machine learning. Tübingen is my academic home - it shaped not only my research style and the questions I work on, but more importantly the kind of advisor and colleague I try to be. I learned what it means to be a great advisor from watching Ulrike and Deb - I always felt that they had our best interests at heart, and as a faculty member now I often catch myself asking, "what would Ulrike or Deb do here?" Coming from such an environment has been a real privilege.