Welcome!

I am an Assistant Professor in the AMS department at Colorado School of Mines. My work lies in the intersection of machine learning, signal processing and optimization. I am particularly interested in devising new algorithms for old problems that scale efficiently to large data sets. My recent and ongoing projects include:

• Using compressed sensing to devise new approaches to high-dimensional zeroth order optimization.
• Using path metrics to get a handle on high-dimensional point clouds, particularly when they are sampled from a low dimensional manifold.
• Deep learning, particularly implicit neural networks.

I received my PhD from the University of Georgia in May 2019, under the supervision of Ming-Jun Lai. Prior to that I was an undergraduate at the University of Cape Town, from where I also received my Master’s degree. In between Cape Town and Athens, Georgia I spent a semester at the University of Bayreuth.

I enjoy teaching upper and lower division courses, and strive to make my classrooms a welcoming space for all. You can find more information on my teaching page. This semester I am teaching Math 551: Computational Linear Algebra.

You can reach me at d[my surname]@mines.edu. My physical address is 1500 Illinois Street, Golden, CO, 80401.