IIIS alumnus, Dr. Tengyu Ma has been selected to receive a 2021 Sloan Research Fellowship. The Fellowships were awarded to 128 outstanding early-career researchers this year.

Graduated from Yao Class in 2012, Tengyu Ma is an assistant professor of computer science and statistics at Stanford University and studies machine learning and algorithms, such as deep learning and its theory, (deep) reinforcement learning and its theory, representation learning, robustness, non-convex optimization, distributed optimization, and high-dimensional statistics. He is also the recipient of ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award Honorable Mention 2018, COLT Best Paper Award 2018 and NIPS Best Student Paper Award 2016.

Awarded annually since 1955, the Sloan Research Fellowships honor scholars in the U.S. and Canada whose creativity, leadership, and independent research achievements make them some of the most promising researchers working today. Since 2007, 51 Sloan Fellows have received a Nobel Prize in their respective fields, 17 have won the Fields Medal in mathematics, 69 have received the National Medal of Science, and 20 have won the John Bates Clark Medal in economics. Another IIIS alumnus, Dr. Rong Ge also won the Fellowship in 2019.