Medha Agarwal

Medha Agarwal

University of Washington

About Me

I am a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Statistics at the University of Washington, advised by Prof. Alex Luedtke. My research lies at the intersection of causal inference, optimal transport, nonparametric statistics, and machine learning. At UW, I am fortunate to work with Profs. Zaid Harchaoui and Soumik Pal.

I also collaborate with the Abrahms Lab and the eScience Institute on developing AI tools for ecology.

I completed my undergraduate degree in Mathematics at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, with a minor in English literature. At IIT Kanpur, I worked with Dootika Vats on output analysis and convergence diagnostics for Markov chain Monte Carlo and importance sampling.

Contact me at medhaaga [at] uw [dot] edu.

News

May 2026 Gave a talk at the Optimal Transport + Optimization Workshop in Les Diablerets, Switzerland.
May 2026 Our paper titled Sinkhorn Treatment Effects: A Causal Optimal Transport Measure (joint work with Alex Luedtke) has been accepted to the International Conference on Machine Learning (2026).
Winter 2026 Excited to be a Visiting Scholar at the Harvard Medical School.
July 2025 Our paper titled Leveraging machine learning and accelerometry to classify animal behaviours with uncertainty is published at the Journal of Methods in Ecology and Evolution.
June 2025 Attended the workshop on Wasserstein Gradient Flows in Math and Machine Learning at Banff International Research Station.
Feb 2025 Gave a talk at the IFML Mathematics of Deep Learning Workshop in Austin, TX. [Slides]
Feb 2025 Gave a talk at the UW Data Science Seminar titled Revealing the Hidden Lives of Cryptic Carnivores with Machine Learning and AI. Check out the YouTube video! [Slides]

Selected Publications

Sinkhorn Treatment Effects: A Causal Optimal Transport Measure
Medha Agarwal, Alex Luedtke
International Conference on Machine Learning (2026)
Leveraging machine learning and accelerometry to classify animal behaviours with uncertainty
Medha Agarwal, Kasim Rafiq, Ronak Mehta, Briana Abrahms, Zaid Harchaoui
Methods in Ecology and Evolution (2025)