Jacob Calvert

I’m interested in the behavior of collectives, like colonies of ants and swarms of robots, which I study using probability theory and data science. In practice, this often involves interacting particle systems, Markov chains, and discrete geometry. Lately, I’ve been working on a principle of nonequilibrium self-organization and investigating how the behavior of a collective depends on the number of its constituents.

Currently, I’m a postdoctoral fellow at the Institue for Data Engineering and Science at Georgia Tech, supervised by Dana Randall. I’ll spend Spring 2025 in Berkeley, CA, as the Berlekamp postdoctoral fellow at the Simons Laufer Mathematical Sciences Institute (formerly MSRI), during its program on the Probability and Statistics of Discrete Structures.

Previously, I graduated from UC Berkeley with a PhD in statistics. Before that, I completed an MSc in theoretical physics from the University of Oxford, an MSc in mathematics from the University of Bristol, and a BS in bioengineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I am grateful to the Marshall Scholarship for supporting my studies in the UK.

I have nine years of professional experience as a data scientist. From 2015 to 2022, I worked at a clinical machine learning company called Dascena, where I led the research team that developed the first machine learning–based sepsis alert system to improve patient outcomes in a clinical trial. After Dascena was acquired, I joined Forta Health, a startup that expands access to behavioral therapy for children with autism. In parallel, I led the research team at ProGrid Ventures, a startup that develops algorithms for participating in wholesale electricity markets. I left in 2024, to focus on academic research.