James Zou received his PhD from Harvard in 2013, working on applied mathematics and computational biology and supported by an NSF Graduate Fellowship. He collaborated with Brad Bernstein, Michael Brenner and David Parkes. Before Harvard, he read for Part III in Mathematics at the University of Cambridge (thanks to the generous support of a Gates Scholarship), and majored in math and physics at Duke. In biology, he is interested in mammalian gene regulation, epigenomics and population genetics. In math amd computer science, Zou has worked on new probabilistic models for machine learning and models of multi-agent systems (some of which appear in biology). Following his stay at the Simons Institute, Zou will join Microsoft Research, New England as a postdoc.