Aarush Khirwadkar

Hi! I'm a first-year PhD student in the Department of Statistics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. My interests include:​​​​

• Machine Learning: uncertainty quantification, fairness, trustworthiness, and interpretability

• High-dimensional statistics: inference and computing

I am actively looking for learning and collaboration opportunities in these domains. Feel free to reach out if you have any leads or are generally interested!

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Prior to starting a PhD, I spent January–June 2025 as an exchange student at UCL. I was fortunate to also spend a decent chunk of that time backpacking around Europe. This was an extraordinary and unforgettable experience.

 

During the summer of 2024, I interned at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in the System Modeling, Evaluation, and Planning Group (Force Projection Sector). My work focused on developing statistical methods for military applications—in particular, using Fisher Information, Markov chain Monte Carlo methods, and Wishart sampling to find and visualize the uncertainty about Maximum Likelihood estimates of statistical parameters. This allowed us to better understand and visualize how errors propagate through the weapon system. (Check out my notes for more detail!)​

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Previously, I worked at the Institute for Organizational Excellence and Innovations for Peace and Development. ​​​I also had a couple of ventures of my own—check out Wildfire Designs and Texttobuy!

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Outside of work, I played table tennis at the national level, and for UT. You may also find me making (or listening to) music, taking pictures, or writing.

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“The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

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The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others."

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- Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West