My doctorate is not in CS, Math or an engineering field, but I did (somewhat unknowingly) apply ML/statistics to my thesis, which was (more or less) generative

My doctorate is not in CS, Math or an engineering field, but I did (somewhat unknowingly) apply ML/statistics to my thesis, which was (more or less) generative adversarial search 20+ years ago. Everything I did then turned out to be strongly related to techniques like Naive Bayes, Logistic Regression, Principal Component Analysis, Boosting, Bagging, and bunch of other techniques that get reinvented over and over again. Once I mapped them over to their ML incarnations, they were familiar territory going forward.