Group Members
O. Deniz Akyildiz
Assoc. Prof. — Head of Group
Deniz is an associate professor at Imperial who initiated the group in 2023, with broad interests in sampling, optimization, and stochastic filtering. [website]
Alex Glyn-Davies
Schmidt AI in Science Fellow
Alex joined the group in 2026 as an IX Schmidt AI in Science Fellow, sponsored by Deniz. He works on physics-informed machine learning. [website]
Arnaud Vadeboncoeur
Imperial College Research Fellow
Arnaud is an Imperial College Research Fellow sponsored by Deniz. His main research programme is on foundations and applications of distributional inverse problems [website].
Matthew Bentham
PhD student
Matthew joined the group in 2026. He is co-supervised by Nik Kantas and he is a part of Mathematics for our Future Climate (MFC) CDT.
Paula Cordero-Encinar
PhD student
Paula joined the group in 2024. She works on sampling, generative models, and theoretical foundations. She is co-supervised by Andrew Duncan and she is a part of StatML CDT. [website]
James Cuin
PhD student
James joined the group in 2025. He works on statistical inference and generative models. He is co-supervised by Yanbo Tang and he is a part of StatML CDT.
Emily Ehrhardt
PhD student
Emily joined the group in 2025. She works on Bayesian statistical models. She is co-supervised by Randolf Altmeyer and Kolyan Ray and she is a part of StatML CDT.
Joanna Marks
PhD student
Joanna joined the group in 2025. She works on generative models and optimal transport. Her second supervisor is Riccardo Passeggeri and she is a part of StatML CDT. [website]
Paul F. Valsecchi Oliva
PhD student
Paul joined the group in 2023. He works on theoretical foundations of learning algorithms. His second supervisor is Andrew Duncan and he is a part of StatML CDT.
Tim Wang
PhD student
Tim joined the group in 2024. He works on generative models and interacting particle algorithms. [website]
Matthew Young
PhD student
Matthew joined the group in 2025. He works on sampling and generative models. [website]
Jackie Zhang
PhD student
Jackie joined the group in 2025. He works on generative models and interacting particle systems.
Lorenzo Di Giura del Balzo di Presenzano
MSci student
Lorenzo is an MSci student at Imperial Maths doing his fourth-year project with Deniz.
Alisa Klymchuk
MSci student
Alisa is an MSci student at Imperial Maths doing her fourth-year project with Deniz.
Luna Piaraly
MSc Intern
Luna is an MSc student at ENSAE, visiting our group for an internship.
Past (Imperial)
StatML first year (mini) project supervision
Peter HylandRafael Athanasiades
Summer/Visiting students and Interns
Arthur Gilles — (from ENS Paris-Saclay, between 04/2026-09/2026)Robin Mury — (from ETH Zurich, between 04/2026-09/2026)
Laura Sánchez García-Romeu — (from ENSTA Paris, between 04/2026-08/2026)
Tom Rossa — (from ENSAE, between 07/2024-09/2024)
Xinyue Lou — (from Kings College London, between 07/2024-09/2024)
Adam Rozzio — (from ENS Paris-Saclay, between 04/2024-07/2024)
O. Fabian Gonzalez H. — (from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, between 10/2023-04/2024).
Tim Wang — Generative modelling with adaptive Langevin dynamics, Summer 2023 (Imperial - BSc).
Masters
Matthew Young — Generative Protein Design (MRes)Tim Wang - Flow Matching for Inverse Problems (MSc at Oxford, co-supervisor: George Deligiannidis)
Ben Dowling — Diffusion Models for Optimisation (MSc)
Tony Dam — Gaussian Matrix Factorisation via Gibbs Sampling (MSci, 2024)
Joe Marks — Generative Modelling for Data Augmentation in Factor Investing (MSc, 2023)
Rina Maletta — Matrix Variate Gaussian Matrix Factorisation (MSc, 2023)
Sally Marshall — A Temporal Proximal Point Method for Matrix Factorisation of Time Series (MSci thesis, 2023)
Peter Christofides Paton — Investigating Generalisation in Score-Based Generative Models (MEng thesis, 2023)
Undergraduate
Carlos Cardoso Correia Perello — Convergence of Adaptive Importance Samplers for Unbounded Parametric Families (BSc, 2023)Peiyi Zhou — Sampling from log-concave distributions through Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods (BSci, 2024)
Warwick/Cambridge
In my postdoctoral years at University of Warwick (2019-2021) and The Alan Turing Institute (2021-2022) (visiting University of Cambridge), I have had the pleasure of closely supervising multiple PhD students. Below, I list students who wrote theses predominantly consisting of work done in close collaboration with me.Benjamin Boys, University of Cambridge, graduated 2025, (main supervisor Mark Girolami)
Alex Glyn-Davies, University of Cambridge, graduated 2025, (main supervisor Mark Girolami)
Ayman Boustati, University of Warwick, graduated 2021 (main supervisor Theodoros Damoulas)