Welcome to Li Lab at UNC Chapel Hill!

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biostatistics at UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health.

My research interests span across mathematical, statistical, and machine learning theory, methodology, and various real-world applications. 

Research Interest

1.  Dimension reduction

2.  Gaussian processes

3.  Geometric data analysis

4.  Information geometry

5.  Manifold learning

6.  Network analysis

7.  Nonparametric Bayes

8.  Spatial statistics

Application

1.  Biological networks

2.  Brain connectivity

3.  Electronic Health Record

4.  Environmental health

5.  Genetic and genomics

6.  Images

7.  Time Series

Email: didongli@unc.edu

Google Scholar, arXiv

News:

• Mar 2024: Talk at Clemson Statistics seminar

• Mar 2024: Jiawen won the MCBIOS Young Scientist Excellence Award

• Mar 2024: Jiawen, Michael, Sam and Christine present at ENAR 2024

• Feb 2024: Talk at Texas A&M seminar

• Dec 2024: Jiawen, Christine and Wancen present at NeurIPS 2023

• Nov 2023: Talk at Rice Statistics seminar

• Nov 2023: Talk at U Delaware Statistics seminar

• Sep 2023: Talk at Emory Biostatistics seminar

• Sep 2023: Paper by Jiawen and Wancen on identifiability and interpretability of Gaussian process parameters accepted by NeurIPS2023

• Jun 2023: Talk at ICSA Applied Symposium

• May 2023: Hong Niu, Christine Park and Sam Hawke won the student travel award at the 2023 Symposium of Data Science and Statistics

• Apr 2023: Talk at Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard MIA seminar

• Apr 2023: Talk at UNC STOR colloquium 

• Mar 2023: Sam won the best poster award and the student travel award at the Third Annual Workshop on Emerging Data Science Methods for Complex Biomedical and Cyber Data

• Mar 2023: Talk at ENAR

• Mar 2023: Talk at NCSU Biomath seminar

• Mar 2023: Paper on Gaussian process parameter inference on compact Riemannian manifold accepted by Journal of Machine Learning Research.

• Feb 2023: Talk at Brown Applied Math

• Feb 2023: Talk at UNC Greensboro Mathematics and Statistics

• Nov 2022: Talk at Duke Computational Biology & Bioinformatics

• Nov 2022: Talk at UNC School of Medicine

• Nov 2022: Talk at Georgia Tech Math

• Oct 2022: Paper on Gaussian process spatial alignment for spatially-resolved genomic and histology slices accepted by Nature Methods.

• Oct 2022: Talk at Indiana University Bloomington Statistics.

• Oct 2022: Talk at International Conference on Advances in Interdisciplinary Statistics and Combinatorics. 

• Sept 2022: Paper on modeling on symmetric spaces accepted by SIAM Journal on Mathematics of Data Science.

• Aug 2022: Talk at JSM.