PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Reza Gheissari

Reza Gheissari is a probability theorist at Northwestern University whose work on spin systems and Markov chains reaches into high-dimensional optimization and learning. A Columbia mathematics graduate of 2014, they earned a Ph.D. at NYU's Courant Institute in 2019 and spent 2019 to 2022 as a Miller postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley. With Gérard Ben Arous and Aukosh Jagannath, they wrote papers on tensor PCA in 2018, online stochastic gradient descent in 2020 and high-dimensional SGD limit theorems in 2022, the last of which won a NeurIPS 2022 Outstanding Paper award. They joined Northwestern in 2022, received a National Science Foundation CAREER award in 2025, and became a Simons Fellow in Mathematics in 2026. At Northwestern they are an associate professor of mathematics, and they spend Fall 2026 at the Simons Institute before a Von Neumann Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Spring 2027.

Timeline

  1. 2014–2019

    Columbia and a Courant PhD

    They earn a B.A. in mathematics at Columbia University in 2014 and a Ph.D. in mathematics at the Courant Institute of NYU in 2019.

  2. 2018–2020

    Tensor PCA and online SGD

    In 2018, they coauthor Algorithmic thresholds for tensor PCA with Gérard Ben Arous and Aukosh Jagannath, a study of spike recovery through Langevin dynamics and gradient descent that appears in the Annals of Probability in 2020. In 2020, the same trio posts Online stochastic gradient descent on non-convex losses from high-dimensional inference, which sets sample thresholds for online SGD in terms of the information exponent of the population loss.

  3. 2019–2022

    Miller Fellow at Berkeley

    They hold a Miller postdoctoral fellowship at UC Berkeley from 2019 to 2022.

  4. 2022

    A NeurIPS Outstanding Paper

    In 2022, they coauthor High-dimensional limit theorems for SGD: Effective dynamics and critical scaling with Gérard Ben Arous and Aukosh Jagannath. The paper proves limit theorems for the trajectories of summary statistics of stochastic gradient descent with constant step size as the dimension grows, and it wins a NeurIPS 2022 Outstanding Paper award.

  5. 2022

    Joining Northwestern's math faculty

    They join the faculty of Northwestern University's Department of Mathematics in 2022. Their research covers spin systems from statistical physics and the relations of probability to sampling, optimization and learning problems in high dimensions.

  6. 2025

    An NSF CAREER award

    In 2025, the National Science Foundation gives them a CAREER award, a five-year grant titled Analysis of Slowly Mixing Markov Chains.

  7. 2026

    A Simons Fellowship

    In 2026, the Simons Foundation names them one of its Simons Fellows in Mathematics, a program that extends sabbatical leaves to a full academic year.

  8. As of October 2026

    Associate professor on sabbatical

    They are an associate professor of mathematics at Northwestern, on sabbatical for the 2026–2027 academic year. They spend Fall 2026 at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing in its Spectral Theory Beyond Graphs program, then Spring 2027 as a Von Neumann Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS).

Career

  1. Since 2026Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing
  2. Since 2022Northwestern UniversityAssociate Professor
  3. 2019–2022University of California, BerkeleyMiller Postdoctoral Fellow

Education

  1. 2019Courant Institute of Mathematical SciencesPh.D.
  2. 2014Columbia UniversityB.A.

From the biography.

  1. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other universityIncludes Reza Gheissari. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other university. We compare doctorate and 5+ year employment links, career timing and current workplaces for 187 major-prize and 1,111 best-paper winners.
  2. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionIncludes University of California, Berkeley. We estimate where the people shaping AI studied and where their careers led. Massachusetts Institute of Technology leads with 467 former students, including 291 recorded doctorates.
  3. The company share of AI researchers’ top papers was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974Includes University of California, Berkeley. We estimate where the people shaping AI worked when their most-cited papers appeared: the company share was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974, and Google led all organizations in 2020–2024.
  4. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labsIncludes University of California, Berkeley. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labs. We compare publishing careers, recent citations, dual appointments and job moves across 2,420 university researchers and 308 frontier-lab researchers.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

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  1. Reza Gheissari sites.northwestern.edu. Checked 22 October 2026.
  2. [1808.00921] Algorithmic thresholds for tensor PCA arxiv.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  3. [2003.10409] Online stochastic gradient descent on non-convex losses from high-dimensional inference arxiv.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  4. [2206.04030] High-dimensional limit theorems for SGD: Effective dynamics and critical scaling arxiv.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  5. NeurIPS 2022 Awards neurips.cc. Checked 22 October 2026.
  6. News | Department of Mathematics | NYU Courant math.nyu.edu. Checked 22 October 2026.
  7. Reza Gheissari: Department of Mathematics - Northwestern University math.northwestern.edu. Checked 22 October 2026.
  8. 2025: Department of Mathematics - Northwestern University math.northwestern.edu. Checked 22 October 2026.
  9. 2026 Simons Fellows in Mathematics Announced – Simons Foundation simonsfoundation.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  10. Reza Gheissari simons.berkeley.edu. Checked 22 October 2026.