Focus Period lund 2026
Assistant Professor
University of Wisconsin-Madison (USA)
Jelena Diakonikolas is Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Sciences and (by courtesy) the Department of Statistics, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is also an affiliate of the Data Science Institute at UW-Madison.
Her main research interests are in the area of large-scale optimization. She is also interested in applications of optimization methods, particularly within machine learning.
Prior to joining UW-Madison, Jelena Diakonikolas was a Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley’s Foundations of Data Analysis (FODA) TRIPODS Institute, where she primarily worked with Mike Jordan. In Fall 2018, she was a Microsoft Research Fellow at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing, associated with the program on Foundations of Data Science. Prior to starting the postdoctoral position at UC Berkeley, she was a Postdoctoral Associate at the Department of Computer Science, Boston University, where she worked with Lorenzo Orecchia. She completed my Ph.D. at the Department of Electrical Engineering, Columbia University, where she was co-advised by Gil Zussman and Cliff Stein.
Some publications are under her maiden name — Marašević.