Yikun’s Website

I am a postdoctoral scholar at the Department of Statistics, University of Chicago and NSF-Simons AI Institute for the Sky (SkAI Institute). I received my Ph.D. degree in Statistics from the University of Washington (UW), Seattle in 2026, where I was fortunate to be advised by Prof. Yen-Chi Chen. I also obtained my master’s degree in Statistics from UW in 2020. Before joining UW, I received my Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics and Applied Mathematics at Sun Yat-Sen University (SYSU) in 2018.

Research Interests

My current theoretical research interests lie in

• Nonparametric Statistics (Kernel Smoothing),
• Optimization on Nonlinear Manifolds,
• High-Dimensional Inference with Missing Data,
• Causal Inference for Continuous Treatments,
• Transfer Learning and Domain Adaptation.

On the applied side, I am broadly interested in developing statistically principled and AI-driven methods for challenging problems in astronomy and related scientific domains. A central focus of my applied research is to detect, characterize, and extract scientific insights from the large-scale structure of the Universe (i.e., the cosmic web), with the broader goal of turning modern statistical learning tools into reliable instruments for uncovering previously inaccessible physical information.

Contact

• Department of Statistics, University of Chicago & SkAI Institute (875 N. Michigan Ave., Suite 3500), Chicago, IL, United States 60611
• yikunz at uchicago dot edu