Lenka Zdeborová

EPFL SB IPHYS SPOC1
BSP 722 (Cubotron UNIL)
Rte de la Sorge
1015 Lausanne

EPFL SB IPHYS SPOC1
BSP 722 (Cubotron UNIL)
Rte de la Sorge
1015 Lausanne

EPFL SB IPHYS SPOC1
BSP 722 (Cubotron UNIL)
Rte de la Sorge
1015 Lausanne

EPFL SB IPHYS SPOC1
BSP 722 (Cubotron UNIL)
Rte de la Sorge
1015 Lausanne

EPFL SB IPHYS SPOC1
BSP 722 (Cubotron UNIL)
Rte de la Sorge
1015 Lausanne

EPFL SB IPHYS SPOC1
BSP 722 (Cubotron UNIL)
Rte de la Sorge
1015 Lausanne

Lenka Zdeborová is a Professor of Physics and Computer Science at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, where she leads the Statistical Physics of Computation Laboratory. She received a PhD in physics from the University of Paris-Sud and Charles University in Prague in 2008. She spent two years in the Los Alamos National Laboratory as the Director's Postdoctoral Fellow. Between 2010 and 2020, she was a researcher at CNRS, working in the Institute of Theoretical Physics in CEA Saclay, France. In 2014, she was awarded the CNRS bronze medal, in 2016 Philippe Meyer prize in theoretical physics and an ERC Starting Grant, in 2018 the Irène Joliot-Curie prize, in 2021 the Gibbs lectureship of AMS and the Neuron Fund award, in 2025 she received an ERC Advanced Grant. She was an editorial board member for the Journal of Physics A, Physical Review E, Physical Review X, SIMODS, Machine Learning: Science and Technology, and Information and Inference. Lenka's expertise is in the application of concepts from statistical physics, such as advanced mean field methods, the replica method, and related message-passing algorithms, to problems in machine learning, signal processing, inference, and optimization. She enjoys erasing the boundaries between theoretical physics, mathematics and computer science. 

Teaching & PhD

PhD Students

Fabrizio Boncoraglio, Yatin Dandi, Odilon Duranthon, Gabriele Farnè, Cédric Xavier Koller, Jorge Medina Moreira, Yizhou Xu

Past EPFL PhD Students

Hugo Chao Cui (2024), Giovanni Piccioli (2024), Emanuele Troiani (2026)

Courses

Data sciences

PHYS-231

This course introduces tools for data analysis in physics: numerical linear algebra, regression, dimensionality reduction, probability, statistics, uncertainty quantification, random walks, Monte Carlo methods and phase transitions, with Python exercises.

Lecture series on scientific machine learning

PHYS-754

This lecture presents ongoing work on how scientific questions can be tackled using machine learning. Machine learning enables extracting knowledge from data computationally and in an automatized way. We will learn on examples how this is influencing the very scientific method.

Machine learning for physicists

PHYS-467

Machine learning and data analysis are central in sciences including physics. In this course, fundamental principles and methods of machine learning will be introduced and practised.

Statistical physics of computation

PHYS-512

The students understand tools from the statistical physics of disordered systems, and apply them to study computational and statistical problems in graph theory, discrete optimisation, inference and machine learning.