Congratulations to Alex Damian, a recipient of Jane Street 2024 Graduate Research Fellowship. Alex is advised by Jason D. Lee and his work focuses on deep learning theory. Specifically, his research focuses on understanding how optimization algorithms, like stochastic gradient descent (SGD) or Adam, navigate the complex loss landscapes encountered when training deep learning models. This includes characterizing the types of features that neural networks learn, and how the optimization algorithm and its hyper-parameters (e.g. learning rate, batch size, momentum, etc) affect the optimization dynamics. In his free time, he plays competitive video games including Starcraft 2, which he used to play semi-professionally.