Katie Keegan | Emory University

About Me

Hello!

I’m a fifth-year PhD student (wow, time flies!) in Computational Math at Emory University, where I’m supported by a DOE Computational Science Graduate Fellowship and Emory’s Women in Natural Sciences Fellowship. I am fortunate to be advised by Lars Ruthotto.

In summer 2026, I am working with Michael Mahoney’s group at LBNL on generative modeling, uncertainty quantification, and manifold learning.

In summer 2025, I worked with NASA’s Frontier Development Lab on solar active region forecasting with uncertainty quantification.

In summer 2024, I was in California at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab working with Aydın Buluç.

In summer 2023, January 2024, and March 2025, I was in Tokyo at the High Performance AI Systems Research Team at RIKEN Center for Computational Science working with Mohamed Wahib.

I enjoy thinking about incorporating domain knowledge in AI/ML for science and engineering in a scalable, efficient, and mathematically sound way. Specifically, my research interests include constrained generative modeling, simulation-based inference, and high-dimensional data analysis.

Thank you for kindly taking the time to visit my website!

News

🎉 May 2026: Grateful to be featured in this profile in DOE CSGF’s magazine, DEIXIS, and especially thankful to Jacob Berkowitz for his time writing the article!

🎉 April 2026: Happy to share that my paper “Manifold-Aware Perturbations for Constrained Generative Modeling” with Lars Ruthotto was selected as a spotlight paper (top 2.2%) at ICML 2026! Also grateful to be selected as a Gold Reviewer (top 25% of conference reviewers) and to receive an ICML Student Travel Grant.

Upcoming Travel

🛩️ ICML 2026 Seoul, South Korea, July 2026

🛩️ DOE CSGF Program Review Washington, DC, July 2026

🛩️ SIAM Mathematics of Data Science 2026 Conference Salt Lake City, Utah, November 2026

Recent Travel

🛩️ “Computational methods for probability distributions on manifolds” workshop Paris, France, May 2026

🛩️ SPACERAISE Summer School L’Aquila, Italy, May 2026

🛩️ Visit to RIKEN High-Performance Artificial Intelligence Systems Research Team Tokyo, Japan, March 2026

🛩️ Supercomputing 2025 St. Louis, MO, November 2025

🛩️ Machine Learning for Heliophysics Conference Madrid, Spain, September 2025

🛩️ IAIFI Summer School and Workshop Boston, MA, August 2025

Publications

Manifold-Aware Perturbations for Constrained Generative Modeling
Katherine Keegan, Lars Ruthotto
ICML 2026 (Spotlight),
[arXiv]
Projected Tensor-Tensor Products for Efficient Computation of Optimal Multiway Data Representations
Katherine Keegan, Elizabeth Newman
Linear Algebra and its Applications, Volume 729, 2026, pp. 100-147.
[arXiv] [Publication]
Optimal Matrix-Mimetic Tensor Algebras via Variable Projection
Elizabeth Newman, Katherine Keegan
SIAM Journal on Matrix Analysis and Applications, Volume 46, Issue 3, 2025, pp. 1764-1790.
[arXiv] [Publication]
A Tensor SVD-based Classification Algorithm Applied to fMRI Data
Katherine Keegan, Tanvi Vishwanath, Yihua Xu
SIAM Undergraduate Research Online, Volume 15, 2022, pp. 270-294.
[PDF]
Media Processing and A Modified Watermarking Scheme Based on the Singular Value Decomposition
Katherine Keegan, David Melendez, Jennifer Zheng
SIAM Undergraduate Research Online, Volume 14, 2021, pp. 446-467.
[PDF]

Other

Profile in DOE CSGF’s DEIXIS Magazine: here
Invited article at SIAM News: here
I am an FAA-certified private pilot as of December 2021! Here is a cool video of the MBU campus from the sky during a night flight lesson. I have over 150 hours of flight time in four kinds of single-engine land aircraft and recently have been flying mostly light-sport airplanes.
When I’m not in the air or at a desk, I enjoy running, weightlifting, reading, and playing piano.