People / Students / Class of 2025
Yuanrui (Jerry) Zhu earned his Bachelor’s degrees in Computer Science and Data Science from UC Berkeley, graduating with high honors in general scholarship. During his time at UC Berkeley, he completed an honors thesis on conducting user studies for industry-level movie recommendation systems, demonstrating a skillful combination of programming and statistical analysis. He also took a leading role in a Data Discovery Project in collaboration with Honda, resulting in a telematics Business Intelligence dashboard for tracking vehicle and trip data on an interactive online map, empowering stakeholders with enhanced decision-making capacity. Additionally, he conducted research in machine learning labs, co-authoring conference papers on projects related to human-centered AI and text analysis, where he explored the potential of integrating cutting-edge LLMs into the current research landscape. Before joining Northwestern University as a Master’s student in Machine Learning and Data Science, Jerry interned at Baidu as a software engineer, focusing on testing and tuning LLMs for OCR tasks and programming to generate high-quality test images. With proficiency in statistical analysis, machine learning, and natural language processing, Jerry specializes in extracting actionable insights from complex datasets to enhance decision-making processes. His overarching career goal is to advance as a Data Scientist or Machine Learning Engineer, promoting business and operational excellence through data-driven strategies.
