Ethan Levien

Assistant professor of Mathematics, Dartmouth College

GitHub https://github.com/elevien

Research

I am broadly interested in a wide range of questions, both mathematical and biological.

For a complete list of publications, see my Google Scholar.

Mathematical interests

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Growing systems and extremal statistics

My reserach in this area includes:
  • branching processes . These are models of population growth where individuals do not interact and have applications in population biology, but also in machine learning and statistical physics.
  • Extremal statistics and large deviation theory. Extremal statistics concerns the study of maxima, minima and order statistics or random variables, while large deviations are exponentially rate events.
  • Mathematics of machine learning. I'm studying multiple instance learning problems...

Biological interests

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In biology, I am interested in single-cell physiology, including:

  • Size homeostasis — how do cells regulate their size? Do large cells slow down their growth rate, or do they accelerate their generation time?
  • Gene expression under antibiotic stress, especially how patterns of gene expression change under stress.
  • Inference of extreme events in cell populations. When can we predict population dynamics from single-cell data?