Mark Sellke

Mark Sellke is an Assistant Professor of Statistics at Harvard University (joined July 2023). He earned a PhD in Mathematics from Stanford University, advised by Andrea Montanari and Sebastien Bubeck, after a MASt in Mathematics at Cambridge and a BS in Mathematics at MIT. His research sits at the interface of probability, mathematical physics, theoretical computer science, and statistics, with a focus on computational barriers and algorithmic thresholds in random complex systems such as spin glasses. He was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study before Harvard, and in 2025 was named a Sloan Research Fellow and received the Rollo Davidson Prize; in 2026 he received the Bernoulli Society New Researcher Award.

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• Appointed Assistant Professor of Statistics at Harvard University, joining July 2023; the department announcement describes the start date and role.Jul 2023
• Quant employment verification: CONFIRMED. Mark Sellke held a Trading Intern role at Jane Street Capital in New York in January 2015 (listed as 'Trading Intern, Jane Street Captial, Jan 2015 - Jan 2015, 1 month'), a genuine past internship rather than a student program; the entry appears only in his LinkedIn index record, which is not independent primary-source confirmation. Jane Street Capital is a proprietary trading firm that operates in quantitative/algorithmic trading, so the employer is correctly classified as a quantitative finance firm. His own CV lists no quant-finance role, and the public professional record (Harvard, Amazon, IAS, Microsoft Research, academia) shows no trading or hedge-fund employment beyond this January 2015 internship.
• Awarded the 2026 Bernoulli Society New Researcher Award, announced November 2025 by the Harvard Statistics department.Nov 2025
• Named a 2025 Sloan Research Fellow in the area of mathematics, a mid-career recognition that signals his standing in probability/mathematical physics.Feb 2025
• Awarded the 2025 Rollo Davidson Prize and the 2025 Sloan Research Fellowship in mathematics in the same year, plus the 2024(-announced) Bernoulli Society New Researcher Award for 2026 — a cluster of early-career honors that place him among the most recognized young probability researchers.Feb 2025
• Earned a PhD in Mathematics at Stanford University, advised by Andrea Montanari and Sebastien Bubeck, per his own personal site.
• Career path from the CV: postdoc at Amazon (2022-2023) and a member position at the Institute for Advanced Study (Fall 2022), before starting the Harvard assistant professorship in July 2023.
• His January 2015 Jane Street internship (one month, New York) sits in the gap year between MIT (BS 2014) and his Cambridge MASt (2017-2018), so it is a pre-graduate-school industry stint, not a post-PhD quant role. The absence of any further trading employment across a decade of CV, profile and news coverage suggests the internship was not the start of a finance career.
• Public discussion on Reddit and social media (2025-2026) states Mark Sellke joined OpenAI while on leave from Harvard, and a16z hosted him and Mehtaab Sawhney discussing AI and mathematics; this is user-generated/social reporting, not yet confirmed by an official OpenAI or Harvard primary source, so the OpenAI affiliation remains unverified.2026
• Competitive-math record: MathCounts National Champion 2010, IMO Gold Medalist for the USA in 2013 and 2014, and 1st place in the 2014 William Lowell Putnam Competition; these are the achievements that define his early public profile.2014
• Served as a research intern at Microsoft Research in summers 2018, 2019, and 2021 with Sebastien Bubeck, producing the NeurIPS 2021 Outstanding Paper 'A Universal Law of Robustness via Isoperimetry' — one of the three internships that bridge his PhD and industry research.
• Featured in The Wall Street Journal and Nature in June 2026 according to a Harvard Statistics department news item, indicating his research reached mainstream press.Jun 2026