Meet the Fellow: Cedric Gerbelot

Meet CDS Faculty Fellow Cedric Gerbelot, who will join the Center this fall. Gerbelot has been a Courant Instructor at NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences since September 2022, where he conducts research and teaches graduate-level courses in mathematics and computer science.

Gerbelot’s work focuses on high-dimensional dynamics in non-convex landscapes, particularly in the context of empirical risk minimization. He aims to understand how gradient-based dynamics reach certain minimizers in landscapes without strong assumptions that simplify analysis.

“I’m interested in exploring randomly perturbed versions of deterministic, non-convex dynamics,” Gerbelot said. “My approach draws from methods inspired by statistical physics of disordered systems, bridging applied probability and theoretical physics.”

Gerbelot earned his PhD in 2022 from École normale supérieure in Paris, where he studied machine learning and mathematical physics under the supervision of Florent Krzakala and Marc Lelarge. His doctoral work centered on high-dimensional probability, optimization, and mathematical methods inspired by spin glass theory.

At CDS, Gerbelot plans to continue his current research while collaborating with other fellows working on related topics.

Gerbelot’s research has been published in prestigious venues including the SIAM Journal on Mathematics of Data Science, Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), and the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML).

By Stephen Thomas