About Qian Yu

Qian received his Ph.D. from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Southern California (USC). He received an M.Eng. degree in Electrical Engineering and a B.S. degree in Physics and EECS, both from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Before joining UCSB, Qian was a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University. His research interests span information theory, machine learning theory, distributed computing, and many other problems math-related. 

Contact Qian

Selected Awards

 

  • Thomas M. Cover Dissertation Award, 2022

  • Google PhD Fellowship, 2018

     

  • Jack Keil Wolf ISIT Student Paper Award, 2017

     

  • International Physics Olympiad Gold Medal, 2010

     

News

 
  • Sep 2025 — Congratulations to undergraduate researcher Mengtian Hong on a first-author paper accepted to the NeurIPS OPT Workshop.
  • Jun 2025 — Graduate student Kerong Wang presented his first-author paper on coded tensor network contraction at ISIT 2025. 
  • Jun 2025 — Invited tutorial on stochastic optimization at the North American School of Information Theory (NASIT 2025).
  • Feb 2025 — Invited talk at Google DeepMind on coded computing.
  • Our work on stochastic zeroth-order optimization presented at NeurIPS: 2024, 2023

Openings

We have multiple PhD positions for Winter/Spring/Fall 2026. We are looking for candidates who appreciate the elegance of problem-solving and have strong mathematical backgrounds. For prospective students, please apply online and mention my name as a potential research advisor.