Pau Batlle Franch

Pau Batlle Franch is a Research Fellow in the Computing and Mathematical Sciences Department at California Institute of Technology (Caltech), working with Professor Houman Owhadi. He holds a PhD from Caltech (June 2025) and was a research affiliate at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). His research focuses on the intersection of statistics and applied mathematics, including frequentist confidence intervals in inverse problems, game-theoretical uncertainty quantification, and Gaussian processes. He has applied his work to domains like remote sensing, biology, earthquake prediction, and telecommunications engineering.

• Education: PhD in Computing and Mathematical Sciences (Caltech, 2025); Double undergraduate degree in Mathematics and Engineering Physics from Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (CFIS program); Research visitor at NYU's Center for Data Science.

His research interests include optimization-based statistical methods, Gaussian process frameworks for scientific computing, and uncertainty quantification in physical systems. Notable contributions include resolving the Burrus conjecture and developing computational hypergraph discovery techniques applied to NASA JPL projects. His work bridges theory and application, addressing challenges in ill-posed inverse problems and robust statistical inference.

Recent activities include presenting at SIAM conferences and workshops on inverse problems in Earth science. His Gaussian process methods have been published in journals like PNAS and SIMODS, with applications ranging from PDE solving to RNA classification. Collaborations include JPL and the Groningen seismic study.

• Grants & Collaborations: Ongoing work with NASA JPL on lunar rover control and computational graph discovery; Seismic modeling in the Groningen gas field with epistemic/aleatoric uncertainty frameworks.

He maintains an active GitHub profile showcasing projects in machine learning and scientific computing, including repositories like DarwinProjectAnalytics and emb4class.