Piotr Zwiernik

Piotr Zwiernik is an associate professor in the Department of Statistical Sciences. He completed his Ph.D. in statistics in 2011 at the University of Warwick.

From 2016 until 2021, he was an assistant professor at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. He has held research positions at Institut Mittag-Leffler in Stockholm, the Institute for Pure & Applied Mathematics at UCLA and Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands. As a Marie Curie-Skłodowska Fellow, he also spent two years at the University of California, Berkeley and one year at the University of Genoa.

Zwiernik’s main research focus is on mathematical aspects of statistical models, where geometric and combinatorial insights can be useful in understanding existing methods of inference and proposing new ones.

His main area of research explores modelling with positive dependence, inference for graphical models and the structure of latent tree models. He also obtained theoretical results in singular learning theory, tensor analysis, phylogenetics and algebraic geometry. Most recently, he is exploring the links between mathematical statistics and learning theory.

His work is primarily published in the field of theoretical statistics with contributions to journals such as the Annals of Statistics and the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series B. He has also published a research monograph, contributed a chapter to the Handbook of Graphical Models and is an associate editor of the journal Biometrika, the Scandinavian Journal of Statistics and the Journal of Algebraic Statistics.