I am a Member of Technical Staff at OpenAI. I was previously an Assistant Professor of Statistics at Harvard. I received my PhD in mathematics from Stanford, where I was fortunate to be advised by Andrea Montanari and Sébastien Bubeck.
My mathematical research interests are in probability, mathematical physics, theoretical computer science, and statistics. I am especially fascinated by computational barriers and algorithmic thresholds in random complex systems.
My work has received a variety of awards, including the Rollo Davidson Prize, Sloan Research Fellowship, Bernoulli New Researcher Award, NSF CAREER Award, and Best Paper at SODA 2020 and NeurIPS 2021.
Recent and Selected Papers
See my research page for a full list of papers with some accompanying videos, slides, and other media.B. Huang, M. Sellke, and N. Sun. Algorithmic Threshold for High-Dimensional Projection Pursuit I: General Theory
M. Sellke, J. Shi, and J. Wang. Universality of Cutoff for Riffle Shuffling
Y. Polyanskiy and M. Sellke. Nonparametric MLE for Gaussian Location Mixtures: Certified Computation and Generic Behavior
B. Huang and M. Sellke. Strong Low Degree Hardness for Stable Local Optima in Spin Glasses
FOCS 2026
M. Sellke. Localization of Random Surfaces with Monotone Potentials and an FKG-Gaussian Correlation Inequality
R. Bazaes, C. Mukherjee, M. Sellke, and S.R.S. Varadhan. Effective mass of the Fröhlich Polaron and the Landau-Pekar-Spohn conjecture
Ann. Probab., Vol. 54 (2026) no. 2, 1374-1426.
B. Huang and M. Sellke. A Constructive Proof of the Spherical Parisi Formula
A. E. Alaoui, A. Montanari and M. Sellke. Sampling from Mean-Field Gibbs Measures via Diffusion Processes
Prob. Math. Phys., Vol. 6 (2025) no. 3, 961-1022
Conference version in FOCS 2022
M. Sellke. The Threshold Energy of Low Temperature Langevin Dynamics for Pure Spherical Spin Glasses
Comm. Pure. Appl. Math., Vol. 77 (2024), no 11, 4065-4099
M. Sellke. Almost Quartic Lower Bound for the Fröhlich Polaron's Effective Mass via Gaussian Domination
Duke Math Journal, Vol. 173 (2024), no. 13, 2687-2727
A. Liu and M. Sellke. The Pareto Frontier of Instance-Dependent Guarantees in Multi-Player Multi-Armed Bandits with no Communication
COLT 2022
B. Huang and M. Sellke. Tight Lipschitz Hardness for Optimizing Mean Field Spin Glasses
Comm. Pure. Appl. Math., Vol. 78 (2025), no 1, 60-119
Conference version in FOCS 2022
S. Bubeck and M. Sellke. A Universal Law of Robustness via Isoperimetry
Journal of the ACM, Vol. 70 (2023) no. 2, Article 10, 1-18
Conference version in NeurIPS 2021. Awarded Outstanding Paper.
M. Sellke. Covering Irrep(Sn) With Tensor Products and Powers
Mathematische Annalen, Vol. 388 (2024), 831-865
M. Sellke and A. Slivkins. The Price of Incentivizing Exploration: A Characterization via Thompson Sampling and Sample Complexity
Operations Research, Vol. 71 (2023) no. 5, 1706-1732
Conference version in EC 2021
M. Sellke. Chasing Convex Bodies Optimally
GAFA Seminar Notes, 2023
Conference version in SODA 2020. Awarded Best Paper and Best Student Paper.