Dr. Luis Serrano’s interest in mathematics started in high school when he participated in mathematical olympiads, representing his native country of Colombia. Later, he completed a bachelor’s and master’s in mathematics at the University of Waterloo. He then earned a Ph.D. in mathematics (algebraic combinatorics) at the University of Michigan and a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Quebec at Montreal. He became interested in other topics and decided to leave academia and switch to industry. After working at Google as a machine learning engineer in the YouTube video recommendations team, he decided to pursue his passion for teaching. He moved to Udacity as the head of content for artificial and data science, where he taught several online courses in machine learning, deep learning, AI, and related topics. He then moved to Apple as a machine learning educator. Dr. Serrano loves learning new things and always found quantum physics and quantum computing fascinating. For this reason, he became a research scientist at Zapata computing, specializing in the intersections between machine learning and quantum computing, quantum neural networks, etc.

He is the author of the book Grokking Machine Learning, in which he explains machine learning in a friendly approachable way, with stories and pictures instead of formulas. Dr. Serrano’s work in quantum artificial intelligence uses physics, linear algebra, probability theory, and combinatorics. Functional analysis, random matrix theory, and even differential geometry are also used very frequently.

He has a popular YouTube channel (www.youtube.com/c/LuisSerrano) with over 85K subscribers and over 4 million views. In his channel, he explains machine learning, probability, statistics, and other related topics to a general audience. He is a frequent speaker at conferences, panels, and workshops.

Dr. Serrano advises students to: “Go for it! The world outside of academia may look intimidating but the math knowledge you have is very valuable and will be very helpful when learning new topics. Don't wait until you know everything to jump into a field. Start applying for jobs, and learn what you need in the process.”

“Hispanic Heritage Month is very important, as it is an opportunity for Latinas/os to help each other and increase awareness and opportunities to our communities.”

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