People / Alumni / Class of 2023
Jiusi Li graduated summa cum laude from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in May 2021, double majoring in Mathematics and Statistics. He developed strong logical thinking and analytical skills and solidified data science related knowledge from a multidisciplinary curriculum in Mathematics, Statistics, and some programming-oriented courses. He also grew to be a more qualified professional with strengthened adaptable, organizational, and problem-solving skills through multiple experiences at financial and internet companies. With his passion for data science, Jiusi has been willing to participate in discovering more opportunities to utilize his advantages in the industry. A case in point is a project about the Prisoner’s Dilemma supervised by Professor Hildebrand. Jiusi led the team and explored the property of dominant strategies within different strategy sets using the Markov Chain and population models. With the dedication of Jiusi and his partner, they discovered and proved the invincibility strategies in three subsets, and presented their findings at the UIUC Undergraduate Research Symposium. In addition, Jiusi joined Clyde.ai, a start-up internet company, as an analyst. He worked as the leader of the coding team to build a system giving private credit card recommendations from scratch. This system later became the main feature of the company’s website. Both of these valuable experiences not only cultivated his leadership to conduct rigorous research but also reassured his passion for data science. Jiusi always enjoys the process to create, examine, and deliver his thoughts. During his senior year, he joined the IRisk Lab as a research assistant. Under the supervision of Professor Frank Quan, Jiusi along with other student researchers built statistical models to analyze insurance data. As a result, the team consulted companies on the relationship between the cost and other features of the product. After that, Jiusi joined Futang, a private equity management company, as an intern and he showed strong self-learning and self-management abilities. While analyzing trading strategies, Jiusi soon discovered the importance of an intelligent data monitoring system that would greatly boost working efficiency, and he initiated to propose and work on it. Through this project, he not only self-learned a series of web development tools, such as Django, Dash, HTML, and CSS but also successfully launched this system with consistent iteration. As a candidate for the MSiA* program at Northwestern, Jiusi Li is thrilled to pursue his passion for making strategic decisions quantitatively and looking forward to interacting with more fellows who share the same interests.
*later renamed MS in Machine Learning and Data Science
