about me

My name is Katherine Tsai. I am a PhD student of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and am currently a visiting student at Stanford University. I am advised by Dr. Sanmi Koyejo and working closely with Dr. Mladen Kolar. My research interests lie broadly at the intersections of machine learning, signal processing, and high-dimensional statistics. My PhD research focuses on developing principled methodologies to estimate graphs of stochastic processes, and to understand the complex interactions of dynamical systems like brain networks. I care about interpretability, reliability, and integrability in modeling designs and like to think about the underlying statistical and optimization problems. My research is mainly supported by NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. 

Previously, I completed the undergraduate degree at National Taiwan University and the master degree at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, both in Electrical Engineering. I spent a summer at Google Brain in 2022, working on adapting to distribution shifts using causal inference techniques.