Chris Criscitiello

I currently work as a quantitative researcher.

Postdoc: For one year, I was the departmental postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Statistics and Data Science at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. I was lucky to be mentored by Jason Altschuler.

PhD: Before this, I completed my PhD in mathematics at EPFL, where I worked in the OPTIM group led by Nicolas Boumal. My PhD work was awarded EPFL’s 2025 Mathematics Doctoral Thesis Award.

Research: My PhD and Postdoc research focused on nonconvex optimization, with a focus on providing theoretical guarantees. The types of optimization problems I considered usually arose from data science. Much of my work involved geometry in some way or another.

Bachelor’s ++: I did my bachelor’s in math at Princeton University. Between my BA and PhD, I worked at the startup Rose Technologies, primarily consulting for Better Mortage. During my PhD, I interned at Citadel Securities as a quantitative researcher, building models for high-frequency trading.

CV ++: Find my CV here, google scholar here, and Github profile here.

Blog: I started a blog!

Hobbies: I’ve been known to enjoy hiking, climbing, bouldering, soccer, woodworking, and more!