Rate My Professor Vasileios Maroulas

Vasileios Maroulas is a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, with joint appointments in the Department of Business Analytics and Statistics at the Haslam College of Business, the Bredesen Center for Interdisciplinary Research and Graduate Education, and the College of Emerging and Collaborative Studies. In September 2024, he was appointed Associate Vice Chancellor for Research and Director of the AI Tennessee Initiative. He directs the Maroulas Research Group and serves as Chair of the Science Informed AI Cluster. Maroulas earned his PhD in Statistics and Operations Research from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2008, with a thesis titled “Small noise large deviations for infinite dimensional stochastic dynamical systems”; an MSc from the same department in 2006; and a BSc in Applied Mathematics from the University of Athens, Greece, in 2003. His professional trajectory includes Leverhulme Trust Visiting Fellow in the Mathematical Sciences Department at the University of Bath, UK (2013–2014), and Industrial Postdoctoral Fellow with joint appointment at the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications, University of Minnesota, and Lockheed Martin (2008–2010). He joined the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, as Assistant Professor of Mathematics in 2010 and was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2016.

Maroulas specializes in artificial intelligence, machine learning, computational probability, statistics, and topological and geometric data analysis, addressing challenges in biology, medicine, materials science, and national defense. His publications have exceeded 2,000 citations, including "Large deviations for infinite dimensional stochastic dynamical systems" (Annals of Probability, 2008), "Representation of molecular structures with persistent homology for machine learning applications in chemistry" (Nature Communications, 2020), "Variational representations for continuous time processes" (Annales de l'Institut Henri Poincaré Probabilités et statistiques, 2011), "Polymer graph neural networks for multitask property learning" (npj Computational Materials, 2023), and "A Bayesian framework for persistent homology" (SIAM Journal on Mathematics of Data Science, 2020). Notable awards include the Early-Career Faculty Research and Creative Achievement Award from the College of Arts & Sciences, University of Tennessee (2014), Leverhulme Trust Fellowship (2012), and Eleneio Doctoral Thesis Award from the Greek Statistical Society (2009). He serves as Chief Editor of Foundations of Data Science, Editor of Statistics and Computing, and Senior Advisory Editor of ACM Transactions on Probabilistic Machine Learning. The Maroulas Research Group has obtained funding from AFOSR, ARO, DOE, NSF, VA, national laboratories, and private foundations.