I am a third-year Ph.D. candidate in the Statistics Department at UCLA. My research interests involve neural network verification, hard constraint implementation in deep learning, machine learning interpretability, and convex optimization. I obtained my master's degree in Data Science from Stanford University, and I graduated from Southern Methodist University while triple majoring in Mathematics, Statistics, and Management Science.
I have worked as an AI/ML intern at Apple during the summer of 2025 and 2026. I worked as a Deep Learning model development intern at ASML in 2024, and in 2023 I implemented model explainability methods and developed various simulations for model probing during a six-month internship at Chemix AI, a San Francisco Bay Area startup. Additionally, I formulated convex optimization methods for experimentation design during an internship at Uber in 2022.
$10,000 First-Place Winner, Google's AI Assistants with Gemma coding competition (2024)
UCLA Most Promising Young Statistician Award (awarded to one Statistics Ph.D. student per year)
$10,000 UCLA Stone Fellowship (awarded to two Statistics Ph.D. students per year)
UCLA Graduate Dean’s Fellowship (awarded to one Statistics Ph.D. student per class)
UCLA Statistics R&D John Fellow (awarded to one Statistics Ph.D. student per class)
2nd Place Winner of INFORMS National Undergraduate Research Paper of the Year (2021)
Student of The Year, SMU Department of Operations Research and Engineering Management (2021)
Recipient of SMU Summer Research Fellowship Award for Outstanding Research (2020)
Presented to Delphi Research Group, Carnegie Mellon University (August 2022)
Presented at INFORMS Annual Meeting, Anaheim, California (October 2021)
Email: davidtroxell [at] g [dot] ucla [dot] edu