About me
I am a (final year) PhD candidate (with Tamara Broderick) in the EECS department at MIT affiliated with LIDS and a junior investigator in IAIFI. Previously I got two MSc degrees in Statistics and Ecology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a SM degree from MIT in Computer Science. I did my undergraduate degree in Biology/Physics at Peking University.
My research focus on statistics and machine learning methods as well as experimental planning for scientific problems in biology and physics, ranging from perturbing gene networks, measuring fluid dynamics in cells, surveying animal populations to calibrating standard candles for cosmic distance ladder. I am especially interested probabilistic machine learning in scarce data and/or low signal to noise ratio schemes where it is necessary to impose structural regularizations or leverage multimodal data.
I’m currently on job market! I am looking for postdoc, TT assistant professor, research scientist or quantitative researcher roles. Please feel free to email me if you want to chat!
Current projects
- Trajectory and SDE inference in computational biology using multimarginal Schrödinger bridges and least square in distribution space; identifiability theory of stochastic dynamics;
- Probabilistic machine learning and generative models in physics, especially time domain astronomy, focusing on methods for irregularly sampled sequence data (e.g., timeseries, spectra, etc.) and simulation based inference;
- Theory of learning human preference from binary annotations, corresponding experimental design and robustness checks, with applications in Large Language Model alignment and evaluations;
- Population ecology of apex predators and capture-recapture models (e.g., jaguars and wolves).
Some stuff I have worked in the past
- Species and feature sampling problem with heterogeneity, multivariate (completely) random measures and application in genetics and sequencing strategies;
- Identifying stellar flares from photometric data using Hidden Markov Models;
- Spike-and-Slab LASSO on multivariate regressions/chain graphs, its frequentist properties and experimental design for microbiome studies.
More about me
I am a wildlife photographer and angler in my spare time. I hold a technician class amateur radio license, bearing KD9TZJ call sign. I am also an ACG fan.