Alex Cloninger is an Associate Professor in Mathematics and the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute at UC San Diego. He received his PhD in Applied Mathematics and Scientific Computation from the University of Maryland in 2014, and was then an NSF Postdoc and Gibbs Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Yale University until 2017, when he joined UCSD. Alex researches problems in the area of geometric data analysis and applied harmonic analysis. He focuses on approaches that model the data as being locally lower dimensional, including data concentrated near manifolds or subspaces. The techniques developed have led to research in a number of machine learning and statistical algorithms, including deep learning, network analysis, signal processing, and measuring distances between probability distributions. This has also led to collaborations on problems in several scientific disciplines, including imaging, medicine, and artificial intelligence.