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Graduate student Jocelyn Ornelas-Munoz defends PhD dissertation

April 24, 2025

Graduate student, Jocelyn Ornelas-Muñoz, successfully defended her PhD thesis, titled "Constrained Optimization for Regularizing Machine Learning Techniques to Improve Generalizability," on April 24, 2025.  Jocelyn is co-advised by Prof. Erica Rutter and Prof. Roummel Marcia.  Her committee members include Prof. Chrysoula Tsogka (Applied Mathematics faculty), Dr. Omar DeGuchy (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), and Dr. David Slater (MITRE).

Jocelyn received her B.S. in Applied Mathematics from the University of California, San Diego in 2020.  She interned with Dr. Slater at MITRE in the summer of 2021 and with Dr. DeGuchy at Livermore in the summers of 2023 and 2024 (participating in the Data Science Summer institute in 2023). She received a graduate fellowship from UC Merced’s Data-Intensive Research And Computing Research Training Group Program for the 2022-23 academic year, the SandboxAQ Fellowship for Spring 2024, and the Graduate Division's Faculty Mentor Program Fellowship for the 2024-25 academic year.  She received the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) Outstanding Poster Award  for poster presentation at the 2024 Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) Meeting in Spokane, WA.  She served as the president of the UC Merced's SIAM Student Chapter from 2023 to 2025.  Jocelyn will start her position at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in June, 2025.

Congratulations, Dr. Ornelas-Muñoz!

Dr. Ornelas-Muñoz's selected publications:

  • J. Ornelas-Muñoz, G. M. Terasaki, A. Ranganath, O. DeGuchy and R. F. Marcia, "Signal Reconstructions for ECG-Transmembrane Voltage Potentials Using Transformers," 2025 IEEE 22nd International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging, Houston, TX, USA, 2025, pp. 1-5, doi: 10.1109/ISBI60581.2025.10981210.
  • A. Ranganath, J. Ornelas-Muñoz, R. Smith, M. Singhal and R. Marcia, "Image Separation Using Transformer Attention Models," 2024 IEEE International Conference on Future Machine Learning and Data Science, Sydney, Australia, 2024, pp. 331-336, doi: 10.1109/FMLDS63805.2024.00066.
  • J. Ornelas-Muñoz, E. M. Rutter, M. Banuelos, S. S. Sindi and R. F. Marcia, "Sparse Negative Binomial Signal Recovery for Genomic Variant Prediction in Diploid Species," 2024 46th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, Orlando, FL, USA, 2024, pp. 1-5, doi: 10.1109/EMBC53108.2024.10782090.
  • J. Ornelas-Muñoz, E. M. Rutter and R. F. Marcia, "From Observations to Theoretical Consistency: Decoder Recovery in Coded Aperture Imaging Using Convolutional Neural Networks," 2024 IEEE Conference on Computational Imaging Using Synthetic Apertures, Boulder, CO, USA, 2024, pp. 01-05, doi: 10.1109/CISA60639.2024.10576438.
  • J. Ornelas-Muñoz, E. M. Rutter and R. F. Marcia, "Decoding the Hidden: Direct Image Classification Using Coded Aperture Imaging," 2023 IEEE 9th International Workshop on Computational Advances in Multi-Sensor Adaptive Processing, Herradura, Costa Rica, 2023, pp. 361-365, doi: 10.1109/CAMSAP58249.2023.10403419.