I am an Associate Professor and Curtis Mathes Memorial Fellow at The University of Texas at Austin. I am with the Statistics Group at the McCombs School of Business. I am also a core faculty member in the Department of Statistics and Data Sciences (SDS) and a core member of the Machine Learning Laboratory. I received my Ph.D. from Duke University in 2013, Master's from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2008, and B.Sc. from Nanjing University in 2005. My Ph.D. advisor was Dr. Lawrence Carin.

The research of my group lies at the intersection of machine learning and Bayesian statistics. We are interested in probabilistic methods, approximate inference, generative models, deep neural networks, Bayesian nonparametrics, and reinforcement learning. We are currently focused on advancing both statistical inference with deep learning and deep learning with probabilistic methods. The deep probabilistic models and inference algorithms developed in our group have been applied to tackle challenging problems in a wide variety of research areas, including computer vision, natural language processing, sequential decision making, text analysis, image processing, time series modeling, graph mining, inverse materials design, and bioinformatics. Our recent research has received funding/computing support from NSF, NIH, TACC, and Microsoft.

I am an Action Editor of the Journal of Machine Learning Research and have frequently served as an Area Chair for ICLR, ICML, and NuerIPS.

To prospective Ph.D. students

You are welcome to apply to
The statistics Ph.D. program of the IROM department
The statistics and data science Ph.D. program of the SDS department

Research Highlights