Positions:
2025--now: Amazon Scholar
2023--now: Associate Professor, Department of Statistics, University of California, Davis.
2018--2023: Assistant Professor, Department of Statistics, University of California, Davis.
2016--2018: Postdoctoral Mentors: Prof. Jianqing Fan and Prof. Han Liu, Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering, Princeton University.
2014--2016: Postdoctoral Mentor: Prof. Ming Yuan, Department of Statistics, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Visiting Positions:
Aug'22 - Dec'22: Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing, Graph Limits and Processes on Networks program.
Aug'21 - Dec'21: Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing, Geometric Methods in Optimization and Sampling program.
Education:
2010--2014: Ph.D. in Computer Science. Advisor: Prof. Guy Lebanon, Georgia Institute of Technology.
Industry internship:
Jan'11-June'11: NEC Laboratories America (with Dr. Kai Yu and Prof. Tong Zhang)
Honors and Awards:
INFORMS Computing Society Prize, 2024
Graduate Program Advising and Mentoring Award, UC Davis, 2023
Facebook PhD fellowship, 2013-14
Best paper runner-up at ICML, 2013
Conference Organization:
May'26: Co-organizing a workshop on Stein's Method Meets Statistical Learning, Banff, Canada.
Aug'25: Co-organizing a workshop on Stein's method in stochastic geometry, statistical learning and optimization at Oberwolfach, Germany.
July'23: Co-organized a mini-symposium in XVI International Conference Stochastic Programming, Davis, CA
June'23: Co-organized two mini-symposiums in SIAM Conference on Optimization (OP23), Seattle, WA.
April'22: Co-organized Advances in Stein’s method and its applications in Machine Learning and Optimization workshop at Banff, Canada.
Editorial Service:
Associate Editor: Annals of Statistics (AoS) 2025-present.
Associate Editor: IEEE Transactions on Information Theory (IEEE IT) 2025-present.
Action Editor: Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR) 2023-present.
Area Chair: ICML 2021-present, COLT 2021-present, AISTATS 2021-present, NeurIPS 2021-present.