Personal

I was born and raised in Beijing, China. I use he/him/his pronouns. My name, Shaoyang, is pronounced more or less similar to shaw-young. My full name in Chinese is 宁少阳 (pronounced: Nìng Shào yáng).

Growing up, I was drawn to both math and biology but struggled to reconcile my diverging interests. It was not until college that I discovered statistics, which allowed me to pursue an interdisciplinary path. Hoping to bring applied statistics to a broader audience, a group of us have been working on translating Imbens & Rubin (2016)'s book, Causal Inference in Statistics, Social, and Biomedical Sciences, into Chinese.

Being a cinephile, I keep an active film critics blog; I have been collecting film award data for years to train my Oscar predictor.

My all-time top 10 list:

• 10. 三峡好人(Still Life) (2006)

• 9. Dolor y gloria (Pain and Glory) (2019) 

• 8. Aruitemo aruitemo (Still Walking) (2008)

• 7. Manchester by the Sea (2016)

• 6. Citizen Kane (1941)

• 5. Winter Sleep (2014)

• 4. Boyhood (2014)

• 3. Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)

• 2. Shawshank Redemption (1994)

• 1. Fight Club (1999)