Souvik Dhara [CV]
Assistant Professor
School of Industrial Engineering
Purdue University
Email: sdhara@purdue.edu
Hello there! You have landed in my research webpage. Currently, I am an Assistant Professor at the School of Industrial Engineering (primary) and Department of Mathematics (by courtesy) at Purdue University.
My research interest lies at the intersection of applied probability and large-scale networks. I am interested in two broad questions:
➢ Can we find hidden patterns in networks?
➢ Do microscopic properties govern the macroscopic behavior of networks?
Previously, I was a Schramm Fellow at MIT Mathematics and Microsoft Research.
At MIT, I worked with Elchanan Mossel on foundations of Machine Learning algorithms on network data.
➢ Here is the link to a 10-min talk on our recent results on this topic.At Microsoft Research, I worked with Christian Borgs and Jennifer Chayes on Graphons (limits of large networks) and their applications to Non-parametric Statistics and the study of Rare Events.
I also spent the Fall 2022 semester as a Simons-Berkeley Fellow at the Simons Institute at UC Berkeley, at and spent Spring 2023 as a Postdoctoral research associate at Brown University working with Kavita Ramanan.
My PhD was part of a multi-instituitional program in the Netherlands, called NETWORKS, where I worked broadly in probabilistic problems motivated by statistical physics, operations research, optimization. I received my PhD from Eindhoven University of Technology under the guidance of Remco van der Hofstad and Johan van Leeuwaarden.
➢ My thesis on Phase Transition in Complex Networks won the Stieltjes Prize for the best PhD thesis in mathematics, published in The Netherlands
Outside research, I love music and travelling. I also play Indian Classical Music on Sarod.
Research Interests
Broad interests: Large-scale Networks, Inference and Algorithms on Networks, Stochastic Processes, High-dimensional Probability and Statistics
Specific interests: Clustering in Networks (Spectral Algorithms, Representation Learning), Spread of Epidemics/Information, Random Graphs/Matrices, Phase Transition, Graph Limits, Non-parametric Analysis on Networks, Rare Events (Large Deviation)
Awards and Honors
PayPal Research Fellowship (2022).
Simons-Berkeley Research Fellowship (2022).
IMS New Researcher Travel Award (2020).
AMS-Simons Travel Grant (2019).
Stieltjes Prize for the best PhD thesis in mathematics, published in The Netherlands (2019).
Prof. Anil Bhattacharya Award for academic achievements during Bachelor’s degree (2012).
INSPIRE scholarship from Department of Science and Technology, Government of India (2011).
Jagadish Bose National Science Talent Search scholarship (2009).