Jared Deighton
Assistant Professor, Director of Data Science and AI Program

Biography

Dr. Jared Deighton joined the Department of Mathematics at Westfield State University in 2026. He was hired in part to develop and lead the Data Science and AI program.

Dr. Deighton earned his Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, in 2025, under the advisory of Dr. Vasileios Maroulas. His dissertation applied information-theoretic and machine learning methods to problems in spatial navigation and pharmacokinetic imaging. His research sits at the intersection of applied mathematics, artificial intelligence, and computational neuroscience, and has included work on biologically inspired neural network models of place cells and on analyzing functional ultrasound imaging data to determine how drugs affect brain activity. He holds a B.S. from Calvin University.

Dr. Deighton teaches courses across the mathematics, statistics, and data science curriculum. He enjoys teaching students “the language of mathematics,” primarily through discussion. He also advises students as they plan their paths through the major and into careers in data science and analytics.

Education

  • Ph.D., Mathematics (Mathematical Biology concentration), The University of Tennessee

  • M.S., Mathematics, The University of Tennessee

  • B.S., Mathematics, Calvin University

Courses Taught

  • CAIS-0105/MATH-0113: Introduction to Data Science

  • MATH-0108: Elementary Statistics

  • MATH-0340: Mathematical Statistics I

Areas of Research

Applied Mathematics

Artificial Intelligence

Computational Neuroscience

Data Science

Mathematics Education

Publications

Jared Deighton, Wyatt Mackey, Ioannis Schizas, David L. Boothe, and Vasileios Maroulas. “Spectral-stimulus information for self-supervised stimulus encoding”. In: The Annals of Applied Statistics 20.2 (2026), pp. 1247–1266. doi: 10.1214/26-AOAS2167. url: https://doi.org/10.1214/26-AOAS2167.

Jared Deighton, Shan Zhong, Kofi Agyeman, Wooseong Choi, Charles Liu, Darrin Lee, Vasileios Maroulas, and Vassilios Christopoulos. “Functional Ultrasound Imaging Combined with Machine Learning for Whole-Brain Analysis of Drug-Induced Hemodynamic Changes”. In: Imaging Neuroscience (2025).

Wyatt Mackey, Ioannis Schizas, Jared Deighton, David L Boothe Jr, and Vasileios Maroulas. “Geometric sparsification in recurrent neural networks”. In: npj Artificial Intelligence 1.1 (2025), p. 15.

Kristen R Alford, Lydia K Walls, Stacy L DeRuiter, Randall Pruim, Jason E VanHorn, Matthew Bone, Jared Deighton, Jamison Koeman, Sadie Kornoelje, Abdul Koroma, et al. “Reduction in diarrhoea rates after household water filter distribution in small and remote communities in Liberia”. In: Cogent Public Health 10.1 (2023), p. 2205716.

Kristen R Alford, Katherine D Rosendale, Abdul Hafiz Koroma, Stacy L DeRuiter, Randall Pruim, Jason E VanHorn, Matthew Bone, Jared Deighton, Adam DenHaan, Jamison Koeman, et al. “Evaluating filter functionality and user competence after a hollow fiber membrane filter intervention in Liberia”. In: Journal of Water, Sanitation and Hygiene for Development 12.12 (2022), pp. 851–861.

Headshot of Dr. Jared Deighton.