Zaid Ahmad

I am a first-year PhD student at Columbia. Previously, I was an undergraduate at Berkeley, and a graduate student at Oxford supported by a Peter Thomason Scholarship. My research interests are in probability, statistics, and algorithms, broadly defined.

On the industrial side, I have interned in both quantitative finance and software engineering. At Ushur, a series C insurance startup, I focused on backend platform optimization. At Google, I worked on serving better user recommendations for the Shopping team. Later on, I worked on macro L/S at Caxton Associates based out of London, and on high-yield fixed income research at Citadel in New York.

I had the pleasure of growing up first in San Francisco and then in London, Bangalore, and Seattle. I also love surfing, marathon running, and reading. In a former life, I captained the surf team at Berkeley and played soccer for the San Jose Earthquakes and Seattle Sounders Development Academies.

A note on my name: People often struggle with my name. It's pronounced "Zed," like "Ted," with a "Z."