I have been a Lecturer in Applied Mathematics (equivalent to Assistant Professor) at the University of Manchester since September 2023.
In addition, I have been an Associate Editor of Statistics and Computing and of the SIAM/ASA Journal on Uncertainty Quantification since November 2023 and since January 2024, respectively. I am a member of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), of the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS), and of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (IMA).
CV
My first academic position was at Heriot-Watt University, where I was an Assistant Professor from September 2021 to August 2023. Previously, I was a Research Associate in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, University of Cambridge, from January 2020 to August 2021. There, I worked with Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb in the Cambridge Image Analysis group and the EPSRC-funded project PET++. During the academic year 2020/2021, I was also a Rokos Postdoctoral Research Associate at Queens’ College, Cambridge.
In December 2019 I earned a doctoral degree (Dr. rer. nat.) from the Technical University of Munich (TUM), where I had been a student of Elisabeth Ullmann since September 2016. The title of my thesis is “Exploring and exploiting hierarchies in Bayesian inverse problems”. During my PhD I was part of the project 10.02/BAYES within the International Graduate School of Science and Engineering (IGSSE). Moreover, I was able to collaborate with the groups of Fabio Nobile and Daniel Kressner at École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, where I stayed for three months in 2018.
Before moving to Munich as a PhD student, I studied Mathematics and Scientific Computing at Trier University, Germany and the University of Warwick, UK, respectively. During my B.Sc. and M.Sc. studies, I was a scholar of Konrad Adenauer Foundation, Germany. I obtained my Abitur (German high school diploma, matriculation examination) from Otto-Hahn-Gymnasium, Saarbrücken, Germany.
Recognition
I have been fortunate to receive special recognition for some of my work.
For the journal publication [L. 2020; SIAM/ASA J. Uncertain. Quantif. 8(1), p. 451–482] that I had submitted during my doctoral studies, I was awarded a 2020 SIAM Student Paper Prize by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), Philadelphia, PA. The same article has later been chosen as the best article in SIAM/ASA Journal on Uncertainty Quantification Volumes 7-10 with exceptional interest to the whole SIAM community and, thus, awarded a SIGEST; an updated version of the article appeared in SIAM Review: [L. 2023; SIAM Rev. 65(3), p. 831-865].
The journal Inverse Problems (Institute of Physics, London) has included me in their special issue Emerging Talents 2021.
Especially in regard to my work [L. 2021; Stat. Comput. 31, 39] but also for general contributions to uncertainty quantification, I received the 2024 SIAM Activity Group on Uncertainty Quantification Early Career Prize and, thus, gave the Prize Lecture at the SIAM Conference on Uncertainty Quantification 2024 in Trieste, Italy.
Personal life
In my personal life I am passionate about music and arts: I have been playing in various rock, pop, and jazz bands since the age of 14-15. For a couple of years now, I have also been painting (aquarelle) and printing (linocuts) and doing analog photography. Indeed, the photos you can see above were taken by myself. Other than producing media, I also enjoy it passively: art museums, concerts, plays, operas, books, films, and also video games.
Another passion of mine is science communication:
- Jonas Latz, Björn Sprungk (2022): Solving inverse problems with Bayes’ theorem. Snapshots of Modern Mathematics from Oberwolfach. (open access)
- Jonas Latz, Elisabeth Ullmann (2018): Wie lernen Computer die Erdbeschleunigung?, TUM Campus Magazin, 01/2018 (open access, in German).
- Uncertaintea Quantification (Youtube), Science Slam, Hamburg, 2017. (in German)
- Jonas Latz, Elisabeth Ullmann (2017): Bayes’sche Inversion am Beispiel des Fadenpendels. Quartl 84. (open access, in German)
Latzplacian?
The name of my webpage and blog, Latzplacian, is a pun. In the following paragraph, I will explain this pun (spoiler!).
Latzplacian is a mixture of my last name Latz and the Laplacian, a differential operator named after Pierre-Simon de Laplace (1749-1827). Both, the Laplacian and the probabilistic work of Laplace frequently appear in my research. From a different perspective, Latzplacian could be seen as a small alteration to Latz’s place. The –ian suffix implies then that this webpage is related to my place – which it, indeed, probably is.