Lucas Janson returns to the Farm as Associate Professor

Lucas begins his new appointment on September 1st, with an office in our CoDa suite. After earning BS and MS degrees at Stanford, he attained his PhD under Emmanuel Candès here in 2017. He went straight to Harvard as an assistant professor with the Department of Statistics, later advancing to associate professor as well as becoming an affiliate in the computer science area of their School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He's also been kept busy with associations at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability at Harvard.

Lucas studies high-dimensional inference and statistical machine learning and, in addition to methodological and theoretical work, collaborates with domain experts to apply his work to scientific fields including genetics, political science, and climatology. He has been recognized with the Bernoulli Society New Researcher Award in Mathematical Statistics, a Noether Early Career Scholar Award by the American Statistical Association for exceptional work in non-parametric statistics, and the COPSS Emerging Leader Award for 2025. Earlier this summer these pages announced Lucas' joint honor of a 2026 Frontiers in Science Award from the International Congress for Basic Science, with coauthors Emmanuel Candès, Yingying Fan and Jinchi Lv (both of USC). We're chuffed to welcome him home!