Nikita Karagodin

Nikita Karagodin is a PhD student in EECS at MIT (2023-2027), advised by Yury Polyanskiy, working on the mathematical theory of transformers. Previously he studied mathematics at Saint Petersburg State University (BSc & MSc, 2017-2023) and the Computer Science Center data-science program, competed for the Russian Federation at IMO 2016 (silver), and held R&D roles at Huawei and the HFT firm Pinely before a summer 2026 quantitative-research internship at Citadel Securities. Current employment per his own CV is a research/PhD role at MIT.

Notes5

• Quant employment verification: CONFIRMED. Primary evidence: the subject's own CV at nikit.us/cv/ lists 'Citadel Securities, Quantitative Researcher (Intern) Jun 2026 - Aug 2026, Deep learning research' and 'Pinely (HFT firm), R&D, Data Scientist Apr 2022 - Aug 2022 - Analyzed market data using ML techniques to extract relevant features; explored cross-exchange arbitrage strategies'. Employer classification: Citadel Securities and Pinely are both verified market participants - pinely.com self-describes as 'an algorithmic trading firm ... proprietary trading firm ... Most of our strategies are based on HFT (High Frequency Trading) algorithms', and Citadel Securities is a well-known market maker; the ClickHouse company index records Pinely (company_id 140938697, pinely.com) as 'Financial Services' with an algorithmic-trading description (index-only, not independent confirmation). Identity is supported by cross-linked primary sources: CV, personal site nikit.us, GitHub nikitus20, and blog all resolve to the same Nikita Karagodin with MIT PhD and the same role history. Both roles are actual internships/employment, not student programs. NOTE: the index lists Citadel Securities as a current role (start 2026-06), but the CV dates the internship Jun-Aug 2026 (ended before today); current employment is a PhD/research role at MIT, not Citadel.Sep 17, 2026
• Index-only claim (not primary-source confirmed): the local people index lists current title 'Quantitative Researcher' at Citadel Securities with start_date 2026-06-01 and current_employers [MIT, Citadel Securities]; this is index data and conflicts with the subject's own CV dating the Citadel role as an internship ending Aug 2026. Identity: index person_id 1098897452 ('taiga-1098897452'), same LinkedIn /in/nikitus.Sep 17, 2026
• PhD in EECS at MIT (2023-2027), advised by Prof. Yury Polyanskiy and working with Prof. Philippe Rigollet, focused on the mathematical theory of transformers.Sep 1, 2023
• Google Student Researcher (Jun-Aug 2025) working on error detection in LLM reasoning; a research internship, not a quant role.Jun 1, 2025
• Research Assistant at MIT LIDS since Sep 2023, modeling token representations in transformers as interacting particle systems on the sphere.Sep 1, 2023
• First-author/co-author on transformer-theory papers: 'Normalization in Attention Dynamics' (NeurIPS 2025), 'Clustering in Causal Attention Masking' (NeurIPS 2024), and a 2026 VQ-VAE preprint; earlier probability papers in Probability and Mathematical Statistics (2022) and Theory of Probability and Its Applications (2021).Oct 1, 2025
• Earned BSc & MSc in Mathematics at Saint Petersburg State University (2017-2023) and completed the Data Science Program at the Computer Science Center (2019-2022: ML, DL, NLP, RL, statistics).Jan 1, 2023
• Huawei Technologies, R&D Senior Engineer (Dec 2022 - Jul 2023), designing and running federated-learning experiments with the OpenFL framework.Dec 1, 2022
• Represents Russian Federation at IMO 2016, earning a Silver Medal, and won Gold at the 2016 Russian Mathematical Olympiad per his own CV; these are competition results, not employment.Jan 1, 2016
• Public contact email [contact omitted] is published on his resume and blog; the blog also links a Telegram account (t.me/nikita_karagodin).Oct 24, 2023
• Awarded Grand First Prize at the International Mathematics Competition 2020 (top 1.5%), 2nd prize in the 2021 Moebius Contest, and 1st prize in the 2022 HSE & Siberian.Capital student research competition.Jan 1, 2022
• EIMI Researcher (Jun 2021 - Aug 2023) on product-quantization research.Jun 1, 2021