Anna Seigal receives Sloan Fellowship

Anna Seigal, assistant professor of Applied Mathematics at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), has been awarded a 2025 Sloan Research Fellowship by The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The award, one of the most prestigious for early-career researchers, recognizes scientists who embody “the creativity, ambition, and rigor that drive discovery forward.”

Seigal, who joined SEAS in 2023, explores the mathematics of data science using algebraic approaches to answer data analysis questions.

This past year, she was awarded the SIAM Review SIGEST Award, an award for an outstanding paper of general interest in applied mathematics.

Her paper, which she co-authored with Carlos Améndola, Kathlén Kohn and Philipp Reichenbach, found a connection between an area of mathematics called geometric invariant theory (GIT) and a method in statistics known as maximum likelihood estimation (MLE).

GIT is used to organize and simplify a collection of objects while MLE is used to optimize the parameters of a probability distribution — finding the parameter values that make the observed data most probable.

“In both geometric invariant theory and maximum likelihood estimation problems, you can think of the problem as being to optimize a function,” said Seigal. “But the areas were otherwise separate. A few researchers had wondered if there might be a connection between these two fields, but no one had found a way to relate them to each other.”

Seigal and her co-authors found such a way and built a dictionary of sorts to translate problems from GIT into MLE and vice versa.

“This dictionary allows you to look at problems from two different viewpoints,” said Seigal.

With the dictionary, some algorithms that are used in geometry can now be used to solve problems in statistics and vice versa — opening new applications in data science and machine learning. 

Before coming to SEAS, Seigal was a Junior Research Fellow in The Queen's College at Oxford University. She was also a Junior Fellow at the Society of Fellows at Harvard.  She earned her Ph.D. in mathematics from UC Berkeley.