Brooks Paige moved to the UK in 2013 to undertake a D.Phil. in Engineering Science at the University of Oxford. He previously lived in New York City, where he completed an M.A. in Statistics at Columbia University and worked professionally for several years as a software developer and web designer. In the distant past, he was an undergraduate at Amherst College, and remains a strong proponent of a liberal arts science education.

Research interests

The emerging field of probabilistic programming aims to reduce the technical and cognitive overhead for writing and designing novel probabilistic models, by introducing a specialised programming language as an abstraction barrier between modelling and inference. Brooks' research focus is on developing general-purpose Bayesian inference algorithms which can be applied automatically to generative models written as probabilistic programs, with a particular emphasis on sequential Monte Carlo methods and scalable variational inference