Shameek Mandal

Overview

Shameek Mandal is a first-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Statistics at Penn State University. He received his Bachelor's (B.Stat) and Master's (M.Stat) degrees in Statistics (Computational Track) from the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, India.

Prior to joining Penn State, Shameek gained three years of industry experience in the financial sector, working as a Risk Associate / Data Scientist. In these roles, he specialized in developing statistical models, predictive analytics, and machine learning solutions to evaluate risk and support data-driven decision-making. Working directly with complex, real-world data to build predictive risk models naturally exposed him to the challenges of model transparency and real-world distribution shift - which is one of the primary drivers of his current research interest. His research interests broadly covers statistical machine learning surrounding interpretability and robustness of Machine Learning models, as well as the application of high-dimensional statistics to classical machine learning algorithms.