PhD Alumni Success Stories

A decade of mentoring excellence: 10 PhD graduates thriving in industry and academia

10
PhD Graduates
100%
Career Success
2020-2024
Graduation Years
FAANG+
Top Companies

🏢 Tech Industry Leaders

Liwei Wu
Machine Learning Researcher • LinkedIn
Graduated: Winter 2020 • Statistics Ph.D. • Co-advised with Cho-Jui Hsieh
"Advances in Collaborative Filtering and Ranking"
Xiaoyue Li
Software Engineer • Google
Graduated: Spring 2020 • Statistics Ph.D.
"Intensity Estimation of Point Processes in Linear Time"
Qin Ding
Research Scientist • Meta (Facebook AI)
Graduated: Spring 2021 • Statistics Ph.D. • Co-advised with Cho-Jui Hsieh
"Stochastic Contextual Bandits"
Lifeng Wei
Data and Applied Scientist • Microsoft
Graduated: Spring 2021 • Statistics Ph.D. • Co-advised with Cho-Jui Hsieh • COVID-19 Davis Modeling Team
"Statistical Machine Learning"
Xiawei Wang
Data Scientist • Microsoft
Graduated: Winter 2024 • Biostatistics Ph.D. • Co-advised with Thomas Lee
"Survival Analysis with Deep Learning"
Stephen Sheng
Applied Scientist • Amazon
Graduated: Fall 2021 • Applied Mathematics Ph.D. • COVID-19 Davis Modeling Team
"Unsupervised Learning in Images"
Shitong Wei
Machine Learning Engineer • Adobe
Graduated: Spring 2021 • Statistics Ph.D. • COVID-19 Davis Modeling Team
"Graph Trend Filtering"

🎓 Research & Academia

Dmitry Shemetov
Statistical Developer • CMU Delphi
Graduated: Spring 2020 • Applied Mathematics Ph.D.
"Statistical Detection on Networks"

Impact: Leading COVID-19 forecasting and surveillance at Carnegie Mellon

Ran Sun
Postdoctoral Researcher • University of Michigan Traffic Lab
Graduated: Spring 2023 • Transportation Science Ph.D. • Co-advised with Yueyue Fan
"Graph Signal Processing for Transportation Science"

🏆 Mentoring Excellence

🎯 Outstanding Career Outcomes

8 graduates at top tech companies (Google, Microsoft, Meta, LinkedIn, Amazon, Adobe) and 2 in leading research positions (CMU Delphi, University of Michigan).

🦠 COVID-19 Impact Team

Multiple students contributed to the COVID-19 Davis Modeling Team, applying machine learning to public health challenges during the pandemic.

📊 Research Excellence

Students published 30+ papers in top venues including NeurIPS, ICML, AISTATS, and led breakthrough research in recommendation systems and bandits.

🤝 Collaborative Success

Successful co-advising partnerships with Cho-Jui Hsieh, Thomas Lee, and Yueyue Fan, fostering interdisciplinary research excellence.

On Mentorship

"Mentoring Ph.D. students was one of the greatest privileges of my life. It is hard to give up, and I think is the underappreciated part of a professorship."

— From "Tenure and beyond" (2022)