Research, Teaching, Service. Beginning of a new chapter in academia.

Continued working with my advisor after his move to Chicago. Beyond research, this period was shaped by close collaborations, friendships, and the experience of living in a wonderful city that left a lasting impression on me.

My third PhD internship, where I worked on deploying mechanism design ideas on real user traffic in Instagram Reels. This project later became part of my dissertation and offered a rare opportunity to connect theory with industrial-level large-scale systems.

My second internship during my PhD, focusing on preference elicitation in interactive recommender systems. Although it did not lead to a publication, I valued the collaborative culture in Google and the wonderful experience of living in the Bay Area.

My first PhD internship, conducted remotely during COVID. I worked on improving recommendation diversity using bandit models, while also sharing a unique and memorable summer with teammates across locations. And more importantly, it improved my financial condition as a poor PhD student.

Enrolled as a PhD student in the program. Charlottesville was where I first lived in the US, and it remains a place I associate with both intellectual growth and a welcoming introduction to a new environment.

My second full-time job after graduation. Was working on designing and maintaining the content recommendation pipeline for Taobao’s mobile platform, using deep-learning based matching and ranking techniques. While I enjoyed the intellectual work I did there, I was pretty sure that was not something I wanna pursue for the rest of my career.

My first full-time job after graduation. I joined this startup because I did not have time for a serious job hunting. I would not say it was a good company by any sense, but most people I met there are extremely nice and friendly and I’m still extremely thankful to those colleagues who offered me generous help back then.

I obtained my undergrad and master’s degree from Peking University, School of Mathematical Sciences. All I want to say is, when you graduate from the top of the “Mad Schools” in PKU, even without being a top student, the experience itself built your character.