Members -- Akyildiz Group

O. Deniz Akyildiz

Assist. Prof. — Head of Group

Deniz is an assistant professor at Imperial who initiated the group in 2023, with broad interests in sampling, optimization, and stochastic filtering. [website]

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.

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.

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.

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.

Past (Imperial)

StatML first year (mini) project supervision

Peter Hyland
Rafael Athanasiades

Summer/Visiting students and Interns

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)