Welcome to Regular Expressions!
This experiment in recording my thoughts for the tender mercies of the internet has been a long time coming: I think I first floated the title to some friends in 2021, if that gives you any indication. I am very pleased to have made it here, and I hope you are too! First things first:
A few specific welcomes
- If you’re here because we met at a conference or on social media — hello again! Feel free to reach out at rionides@umich.edu if you want to chat about research, compare git workflows, or just say hi.
- If you’re a recruiter — welcome! This blog is the best place to get to know how I think. I hope it gives you a good picture of me as an applicant and as a person.
- If you’re one of my students… good job stalking your instructor :) To reward your diligence, I’m letting you know that there’s always candy at my last discussion of the semester.
About this blog
I post here a few times a month — sometimes technical analyses or project writeups, sometimes more personal reflections on grad school and the Sisyphean task of early-career research. You can expect lots of thoughts on:
- Differential privacy (!)
- Stochastic modelling, particularly for finance
- AI/ML in healthcare, and how to build it responsibly
- The occasional rabbit hole and obsession-of-the-month
I care about creating things that are technically rigorous, original, and actually useful — ideally all at once. Right now, that looks like building generative models for healthcare data, writing a lot of proofs in research, and using my very proper statistical education for some very unserious data analysis.
Most of my work lives in code and LaTeX; this blog is where the thinking behind it gets to breathe a little. It's also a place for me to think aloud — to figure out not just research, but what it means to build a life that’s successful, sustainable, and mine.
So who is this anyway?
In case you don’t know me yet, let’s recap! As of spring 2025, I’ve been taking classes at the University of Michigan for five years — first through high school dual enrollment, where I finished the undergraduate statistics major, and now as a full-time student in Honors Math and Data Science. Most of my current work is at the PhD level in statistics, probability, and optimization. After many years working in data analysis for medical labs, my research is now in differential privacy – my advisor at Michigan is Ambuj Tewari, and I’ll be joining the OpenDP group at Harvard as a researcher for this summer.
Outside of research, I’ve picked up a variety of interests and side projects over the years. I fell into quant finance through my brilliant friends and mentors at Michigan Investment Group (ask me about my daytrading goldbot); a middle school hacking phase left me with a love for ciphers and encryption. After accidentally ending up on a free trip to Greece with several student founders, I gained an interest in the startup space as well. When I’m not doing any of the above, I also spend my time attempting GTO poker, training in Muay Thai, and reigning undefeated at bar trivia.
In summary
It’s lovely to meet you — thanks for stopping by! If you’d like monthly updates on the blog, you can enter your email at the bottom of the page to receive… regular expressions of my thoughts.
No apologies for that one.
Until next time,
- Rita