Research Interests

My work involves delving into the breadth and depth of a variety of elegant discrete structures. Specifically, my focus extends to several interconnected subareas, including: 



Honors and Awards


Fundings



Editorial Board



Supervision


Simon Fraser University: during my postdoctoral fellow appointment at Simon Fraser University, I have taken on the informal supervision responsibility with two math graduate students, alongside with Prof. Jonathan Jedwab.



• Samuel Simon, Ph. D. degree with distinction from Simon Fraser University in April 2023. Thesis: Walks'n'Blocks: Asymptotic enumeration of weighted reflectable walks in $A_1^d$ and $A_2$ and exploration of balanced splittable Hadamard matrices. 


• Jingzhou Na, Master’s degree with distinction from Simon Fraser University in August 2021. Thesis: Perfect sequence covering arrays. Jingzhou is now pursuing his Ph.D. at Simon Fraser University. Despite my move to the University of Delaware, I continue to hold weekly online research meetings with him, and our joint project will form a significant part of his thesis. 


University of Delaware


•Graduate Student: Sean Hazen.


• 2024 Summer Early Research Experience Program: During Summer 2024, I supervised two graduate students in mathematics, Sean Hazen and Carolin McCrorey, and one undergraduate student in finance, Zhixiang Chen. We worked on a recently proposed measure of planarity for vectorial Boolean functions.


• 2025 Summer Early Research Experience Program: During Summer 2025, I supervised one graduate student in mathematics, Caleb Phillips, and one undergraduate student in mathematics, Matthew Donahue. We worked on $\lambda$-fold near-factorization of finite groups.


Plenary and Invited Talks


• Jul. 2016: Plenary talk, Deterministic constructions of compressed sensing matrices, National Workshop on Combinatorial Design Theory and its Applications, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China.


• Jun. 2018: Invited talk, Formal duality in finite abelian groups, Reinhold Baer Colloquium, University of Wurzburg, Wurzburg, Germany.


• Oct. 2019: Invited talk, On the minimum distance of BCH codes, The Fourth Qilu Youth Forum of Shandong University, Shandong University, Qingdao, China.


• Sep. 2020: Invited online talk, Intersection distribution and its application, Colloquium on Combinatorial Designs, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China.


• Jun. 2021: Invited online talk, Packings of partial difference sets, Minisymposium on Combinatorial Designs at 8th European Congress of Mathematics, Portoroz, Slovenia.


• Nov. 2021: Invited online talk, Packings of partial difference sets, The Cascadia Combinatorial Feast 2021 (formerly The Combinatorial Potlatch), University of Victoria, Victoria, Canada.


• Jun. 2022: Invited talk, Packings of partial difference sets, Stinson 66 — New Advances in Designs, Codes and Cryptography, in celebration of Doug Stinson's 66th birthday, Fields Institute, Toronto, Canada.


• Jul. 2022: Invited online talk, Packings of partial difference sets, Codes and Expansions Seminar: Special Session on Recent Advances in Packing.


• Oct. 2022: Invited talk, On the nonexistence of generalized bent functions, AMS Fall 2022 Western Sectional Meeting: Special Session on Algebraic Combinatorics and Applications in Harmonic Analysis, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, US.


• Oct. 2022: Invited online talk, Packings of partial difference sets, Forum on Design Theory and Related Topics, Soochow University, Suzhou, China.


• Jun. 2023: Invited talk, Packings of partial difference sets, The ninth Canadian Discrete and Algorithmic Mathematics conference (CanaDAM 2023): Contributed Minisymposium on Association Schemes — new connections and new developments, University of Manitoba and University of Winnipeg, Winnipeg, Canada.


• Aug. 2023: Invited online talk, Group rings and character sums: a tutorial, Summer School on Combinatorics, Soochow University, Suzhou, China.


• Dec. 2023: Invited talk, Balanced Splittable Hadamard Matrices: Constraints and Constructions, 2023 CMS Winter Meeting: Special Session on Combinatorial Design Theory, Hilton Doubletree, Montreal, Canada.


• Mar. 2024: Invited colloquium talk, On the nonexistence of generalized bent functions, Mathematics and Statistics Colloquium, American University, Washington, D.C., US.


• Jul. 2024: Invited talk, On the nonexistence of generalized bent functions, 30th British Combinatorial Conference: Invited Minisymposium on Designs/Algebraic Combinatorics, Queen Mary University of London, London, UK.


• Nov. 2024: Invited talk, On the nonexistence of generalized bent functions, 2024 CMS Winter Meeting: Special Session on Finite Fields and Applications, Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Richmond Campus, Greater Vancouver Area, Canada.
• Dec. 2024: Invited talk, Intersection distributions and related Steiner systems, 2024 CMS Winter Meeting: Special Session on Combinatorial Designs, Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Richmond Campus, Greater Vancouver Area, Canada.


• Jan. 2025: Invited talk, On the nonexistence of generalized bent functions, Shandong Mathematical Society 2024 Annual Academic Conference,  Qingdao, China.


• Apr. 2025: Invited colloquium talk, Counting fearlessly and meticulously: weight distribution of cyclic codes with generalized Niho-type nonzeros, Mathematics Colloquium, The College of William & Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia, US.


• May. 2025: Invited talk, Partial Difference Sets: Broadening the Scope of the Denniston Family, The tenth Canadian Discrete and Algorithmic Mathematics Conference (CanaDAM 2025): Contributed Minisymposium on Finite Fields and Finite Geometry, University of Ottawa and Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada.

• Oct. 2025: Invited colloquium talk, Partial Difference Sets: Broadening the Scope of the Denniston Family, Colloquium Series of Department of Mathematics & Statistics, University of Richmond, Richmond, Virginia, US. 


• Dec. 2025: Invited talk, Perfect Sequence Covering Arrays: A Group-Based Approach, 2025 CMS Winter Meeting: Special Session on Combinatorial Design Theory , Chelsea Hotel Toronto, Toronto, Canada.

Referee Work


I have reviewed more than 145 submissions to international journals and conference proceedings, including the following:


• Advances in Mathematics of Communications

• Applicable Algebra in Engineering, Communication and Computing

• Archiv der Mathematik

• Ars Combinatoria

• Contributions to Discrete Mathematics

• Cryptography and Communications

• Designs, Codes and Cryptography

• Discrete Mathematics

• Electronic Journal of Combinatorics

• Finite Fields and Their Applications

• IEEE Communications Letters

• IEEE Signal Processing Letters

• IEEE Transactions on Information Theory

• IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing

• Journal of Algebraic Combinatorics

• Journal of Combinatorial Designs

• Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series A

• Journal of Combinatorial Optimization

• Linear and Multilinear Algebra