Yikun’s Website

I am a Ph.D. student in the Department of Statistics at University of Washington (UW), Seattle, where I am fortunate to be advised by Prof. Yen-Chi Chen. During 2019-2020, I served as the Master Student Representative for our department. Before joining UW, I received my Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics and Applied Mathematics at Sun Yat-Sen University (SYSU) in 2018. During my undergraduate, I was also an honor student of the Yat-Sen Honor College, an elite liberal undergraduate institution of SYSU.

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.

On the applied side, I am broadly interested in tackling challenging problems in astronomy, particularly those related to detecting and analyzing the large-scale structure of the Universe (i.e., the cosmic web) through statistically principled approaches.

Education

• Ph.D. in Statistics, University of Washington, Seattle, Sep 2022 – Present
• M.S. in Statistics, University of Washington, Seattle, Sep 2018 – Mar 2020
• B.S. in Mathematics and Applied Mathematics, Sun Yat-Sen University, Aug 2014 – Jun 2018
• Exchange Student in Mathematics and Statistics, University of California, Berkeley, Fall 2016
• Honor Student in Applied Mathematics Group, Yat-Sen Honor College, Sun Yat-Sen University, Sep 2015 – Jun 2018