Prof. Lenka Zdeborová bio

Lenka Zdeborová received a PhD in physics from University Paris-Sud and from Charles University in Prague in 2008. She then spent two years at the Los Alamos National Laboratory as the Director’s Postdoctoral Fellow. She was then Director of Research at the Institut de physique théorique du CEA Saclay, Gif-sur-Yvette, France. Since September 2020, she has been an Associate Professor of Physics and of Computer Science and Communication Systems in the Schools of Basic Sciences (SB) and Computer and Communications Sciences (IC) at EPFL.

In 2014, Lenka was awarded the CNRS bronze medal, in 2016 the Philippe Meyer prize in theoretical physics and an ERC Starting Grant, in 2018 the Irène Joliot-Curie prize, in 2021 she delivered the AMS Josiah Willard Gibbs lecture and received the Neuron Fund award, in 2025 she obtained an ERC Advanced Grant.
She is or was an editorial board member for Journal of Physics A, Physical Review E, Physical Review X, SIMODS, and Information and Inference. Lenka’s expertise is in applications of methods developed in statistical physics, such as advanced mean field methods, replica method and related message passing algorithms, to problems in machine learning, signal processing, inference and optimization. Currently, she focuses on statistical physics of learning, developing solvable models and theoretical principles that explain how modern AI systems generalize, memorize, and scale. She enjoys erasing the boundaries between theoretical physics, mathematics and computer science.