People / Students / Class of 2025
Liana (Jiangying) Bergman graduated from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) in June 2022 with a Bachelor’s degree in Statistics and Data Science. As an undergraduate, Lia developed a strong background in analytics and R programming through a math and statistics curriculum which included a range of theoretical, computational, and analytical courses. This enabled her to explore data science in various fields, particularly in economics and sports. She completed her Senior Capstone project by working with a group on behalf of a Major League Baseball agent to examine trends between missed playing time due to injury while in the Minor Leagues and overall career success. Lia was the project manager for the group's Capstone project, and she led the presentation of their findings. Outside the classroom, Lia continued her work in sports by assisting UCLA Baseball to develop a customizable dashboard in R Shiny that allowed coaches to isolate individual pitcher/batter matchups and identify favorable pairings based on tracking individual pitch outcomes. In addition, Lia assisted with research under Professor Costa in the Department of Economics, generating graphics and assisting in scraping data, to help investigate trends between the life experiences of grandparents and the longevity of their grandchildren across various regions in Sweden. As a rising senior, Lia interned at Lookout, Inc. a cloud security company where she wrote SQL queries in AWS Athena and created visualizations to help develop Tableau reports for the Product Team. Upon graduation, Lia worked at SportsMEDIA Technology, designing models on a variety of tennis-specific parameters. She specifically worked on problems using various clustering techniques related to different playing styles and shot selections. These models were ultimately integrated into an application used at the US Open Tennis tournament in New York. In addition to contributing to the analytical models behind the analysis, Lia worked on optimizing the real-time data acquisition pipeline through the conversion of portions of the codebase from R into MongoDB. Seeking to expand her knowledge in data science, Lia is very excited to join Northwestern’s MLDS Program. She is looking forward to collaborating with her peers through the interdisciplinary coursework and practicum projects. In the long run, she aims to have a rewarding and impactful career in AI, finance, or the technology sector. Outside of school, Lia enjoys watching and playing sports, listening to music, and following the financial markets and various legal cases and blogs.
