Efe Onaran
Efe Onaran

Efe Onaran

Hi! I am a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. From 2024 to 2026, I was also a visiting scholar in the Department of Mathematics, where I taught courses in 2024 and 2025.

Previously, I was a postdoctoral research associate at the Coordinated Science Laboratory of the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign, hosted by Yuliy Baryshnikov, and a postdoctoral fellow at the Technion, hosted by Omer Bobrowski and Robert J. Adler.

My research interests broadly span probability theory and stochastic processes, random geometric graphs, and stochastic topology. Earlier, I worked on statistical and algorithmic limits for recovering structured signals, particularly permutation data.

Curriculum vitaeGoogle ScholarEmail

Education

  • PhD in Electrical Engineering, New York University
  • MS in Electrical Engineering, Princeton University
  • BS in Electrical Engineering, Bilkent University

Papers

Journal articles and preprints

  1. Ising disks: topology preserving Glauber dynamics. Yuliy Baryshnikov and Efe Onaran.

    Journal of Applied and Computational Topology 10(3), Paper 16 (2026). journal · arXiv

  2. Central limit theorems for local functionals of dynamic point processes. Efe Onaran, Omer Bobrowski, and Robert J. Adler.

    Electronic Journal of Probability 31, 1–31 (2026). journal · arXiv

  3. Functional central limit theorems for local statistics of spatial birth–death processes in the thermodynamic regime. Efe Onaran, Omer Bobrowski, and Robert J. Adler.

    The Annals of Applied Probability 33(5), 3958–3986 (2023). journal · arXiv

  4. Shuffled linear regression through graduated convex relaxation. Efe Onaran and Soledad Villar.

    Preprint (2022). arXiv

  5. Gbps user rates using mmWave relayed backhaul with high-gain antennas. Jinfeng Du, Efe Onaran, Dmitry Chizhik, Sivarama Venkatesan, and Reinaldo A. Valenzuela.

    IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications 35(6), 1363–1372 (2017). journal

  6. Silicon–Germanium multi-quantum well photodetectors in the near infrared. Efe Onaran, M. Cengiz Onbasli, Alper Yesilyurt, Hyun Yong Yu, Ammar M. Nayfeh, and Ali K. Okyay.

    Optics Express 20(7), 7608–7615 (2012). journal

Conference papers

  1. Efficient belief propagation for graph matching. Efe Onaran and Soledad Villar. (2020).

    IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP).

  2. Projected power iteration for network alignment. Efe Onaran and Soledad Villar. (2017).

    Wavelets and Sparsity XVII.

  3. Optimal de-anonymization in random graphs with community structure. Efe Onaran, Siddharth Garg, and Elza Erkip. (2016).

    50th Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems and Computers.

  4. Broadcast erasure channel with feedback: The two multicast case—algorithms and bounds. Efe Onaran, Marios Gatzianas, and Christina Fragouli. (2013).

    International Symposium on Network Coding (NetCod).

Talks

Slides

Research

In the paper Ising disks: topology preserving Glauber dynamics, written with Yuliy Baryshnikov, we introduced a Glauber dynamics on a subset of contractible cubical complexes that we call clumps. See Pach's animals for a related definition. In the planar case, the state space is equivalent to the set of self-avoiding polygons.

Supercritical ball-like growth. When the birth-to-death ratio is high, the clump grows indefinitely and looks approximately like a ball, apart from some cracks.
Above-critical branching growth. At a smaller but still supercritical birth-to-death ratio, the clump continues to grow indefinitely but develops a more branched shape.
Below-critical bounded growth. When the growth rate is below the critical value, the clump remains bounded and the Markov chain is ergodic.

Teaching

University of Pennsylvania

University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign

New York University

Head teaching assistant

Grader

Tutoring

Contact

Emaileonaran@seas.upenn.eduefeonaran@gmail.com

AffiliationUniversity of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA