Marzieh Eidi has successfully completed her doctorate on the shape of data

Congratulations to Marzieh Eidi on the successful defense of her PhD thesis “Topological and Geometric Methods with a View Towards Data Analysis”. Best wishes for your future career Marzieh!

Marzieh did her dissertation under the supervision of Prof. Jürgen Jost. Please read how she describes her work:

Today we are confronted with huge and highly complex data, and one main challenge is to determine the “structure” of complex networks or the “shape” of data. To capture the qualitative features of shapes, we developed a (Floer type) boundary operator for both smooth and combinatorial vector fields, and on the geometric side, our developed (Ollivier-Ricci) curvature notion proved itself as a powerful tool for complex network analysis.

This relatively broad topic enabled me to see more and more the beauty of mathematical theories and methods and learn simultaneously about their deep advantages for addressing some of the most challenging questions in data science.

I am extremely grateful to all those people who helped me, who participated directly or indirectly in this work and supported me in the difficult times and specifically during my Ph.D., which has been full of ups and downs; I hope they all feel some part of this work is theirs.

I am happy that this part of my journey ended in a memorable night and with the best defense grade, and I am passionately planning to continue my career on this fascinating path.