Dr. Elina Robeva

Biography

Elina Robeva is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of British Columbia (UBC). She is a member of the Institute of Applied Mathematics and the Center for the Application of Information and Data Analysis (CAIDA), and a Fellow of the Canada CIFAR AI Chair. Her research lies at the intersection of mathematical statistics, machine learning, combinatorics, multilinear algebra, and applied algebraic geometry. She enjoys exploring the mathematical structures that contribute to successful statistical solutions, developing optimization methods for machine learning and inference models that reflect complex data dependencies. Her work encompasses causal inference, graphical models, tensor decomposition, non-parametric density estimation, and super-resolution imaging. Before joining UBC, she was a Statistics Instructor and NSF Postdoctoral Fellow. She earned her PhD in Mathematics from UC Berkeley under the supervision of Bernd Sturmfels and was honored with the Bernard Friedman Memorial Prize in Applied Mathematics. Her academic background includes a BS in Mathematics with a minor in Computer Science from Stanford University.

Research Interests