Pragya Sur - Headshot

I am an Assistant Professor of Statistics at Harvard University. I work on high-dimensional statistics and statistical machine learning, with a focus on high-dimensional regression, classification, causal inference, interpolation learning, and learning under distribution shifts. In Fall, ’21, I was invited to speak at the National Academies’ symposium on Mathematical Challenges for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. See the symposium video for a summary of my research preceding ’21. For a more recent summary, see the Research tab. Here are links to my CV, Google Scholar, and Math Genealogy.

My research is partially supported by an NSF DMS Award, the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fund for Strategic Innovation, a William F. Milton Fund Award, and a Dean’s Competitive Fund for Promising Scholarship (all solo PI). In 2023, I was named an International Stategy Forum (ISF) Fellow. ISF is an 11-month, non-residential fellowship program for rising leaders ages 25 – 35 from Africa, Asia, North America, and Europe. I also lead the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS) New Researchers Group. We organize the IMS New Researchers Conference (supported by NSF) and other activities (details: here and here).

In Fall ’21, I visited the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing, UC Berkeley, as an Invited Long-Term Participant for the Computational Complexity of Statistical Inference Program. During ’19-’20, I was a postdoc at the Center for Research on Computation and SocietyHarvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, hosted by Prof. Cynthia Dwork. I obtained my Ph.D. in Statistics (’19) from Stanford University, where I was honored to receive the Theodore W. Anderson Theory of Statistics Dissertation Award (’19) and the Ric Weiland Graduate Fellowship (’17). My advisor was Prof. Emmanuel Candès. I obtained my B.Stat (’12) and M.Stat (’14) from the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata.

Openings

I am currently looking for motivated students interested in high-dimensional statistics and/or statistical machine learning, with strong theoretical background. Interested aspiring graduate students should apply here.

Contact

Science Center 712
One Oxford Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
pragya at fas dot harvard dot edu