Biography and expertise
I obtained a PhD in Applied Mathematics from the University of Arizona and a Bachelor of Science in Physics from Brigham Young University. Before coming to Texas State University I was a postdoc in the Mathematics Department and the Computer Science Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Education
Doctorate Degree
PhD in Applied Mathematics
University of Arizona, 2014
Master's Degree
MS in Applied Mathematics
University of Arizona, 2010
Bachelor's Degree
BS in Physics
Brigham Young University, 2007
Teaching Interests
Research Interests
Featured grants
- Birrell, Jeremiah. Preserving User Privacy in Federated Machine Learning, Texas State University, $10000. (Submitted: October 2025, Funded: January 2026 - May 2027). Grant.
Featured scholarly/creative works
- Birrell, J., Katsoulakis, M. A., Rey-Bellet, L., Zhang, B., & Zhu, W. (2025). Nonlinear denoising score matching for enhanced learning of structured distributions. Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering. Retrieved from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0045782525004980
- Birrell, J., & Ebrahimi, R. (2025). Optimal Transport Regularized Divergences: Application to Adversarial Robustness. SIAM Journal on Mathematics of Data Science, 7, 1801–1827. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1137/24M1659182
- Birrell, J., Ebrahimi, R., Behnia, R., & Pacheco, J. (2024). Differentially Private Stochastic Gradient Descent with Fixed-Size Minibatches: Tighter RDP Guarantees with or without Replacement. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37 (NeurIPS 2024). Retrieved from https://neurips.cc/virtual/2024/poster/95041
- Birrell, J., Katsoulakis, M. A., Rey-Bellet, L., & Zhu, W. (2022). Structure-preserving GANs. In Proceedings of Machine Learning Research (ICML 2022) (Vol. 162, pp. 1982–2020). Retrieved from https://proceedings.mlr.press/v162/birrell22a.html
- Birrell, J., Dupuis, P., Katsoulakis, M. A., Pantazis, Y., & Rey-Bellet, L. (2022). (f,Γ)-Divergences: Interpolating between f-Divergences and Integral Probability Metrics. Journal of Machine Learning Research, 23. Retrieved from https://www.jmlr.org/papers/v23/21-0100.html
Featured awards
- Award / Honor Recipient: Best Paper Award, HMISA 2025 Workshop, 46th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). May 2025
- Award / Honor Recipient: Best Paper Award at WITS 2025, Annual Workshop on Information Technologies and Systems. December 19, 2025
Featured service activities
- Chair
Colloquium Committee
- Co-Chair
Linear Algebra Teaching Forum
- Reviewer / Referee
Journal of Computational Science
- Reviewer / Referee
Forty-Second International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2025)
- Reviewer / Referee
Journal of the American Statistical Association
- Member
Library Committee