Meet the Fellow: Yuzhou Gu

This entry is a part of our Meet the Fellow blog series, which introduces and highlights Faculty Fellows who have recently joined CDS.

Meet new CDS Faculty Fellow Yuzhou Gu, who will join the Center for Data Science in September 2024. Prior to his appointment at CDS, Gu was a member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton from September 2023 to July 2024.

Gu completed his PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in June 2023. His doctoral thesis, “Channel Comparison Methods and Statistical Problems on Graphs,” was awarded the George M. Sprowls PhD Thesis Award by MIT’s EECS Department in 2024.

Gu’s research focuses on high-dimensional statistics, particularly phase transition phenomena in statistical models. “I’m interested in how abrupt changes occur in system behavior as parameters change,” Gu said. He’s also exploring the “information-computation gap,” where phase transition points differ between information and computational problems in certain models.

At CDS, Gu plans to continue his work on community detection in complex networks. “Community detection involves identifying subgraphs with high density in complex graphs,” he explained. “We study theoretical models of this behavior and aim to detect or recover these communities.”

“CDS and NYU have a very strong group in applied mathematics, with quite a few people who share similar interests,” Gu said. “I’m excited to work with researchers and students here, and I’m also interested in expanding my areas of interest into other aspects of statistics and machine learning.”

By Stephen Thomas