Tengyuan Liang

Tengyuan Liang is an Associate Professor of Econometrics and Statistics and William S. Fishman Faculty Scholar at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Liang's research focuses on problems at the intersection of inference, learning, and optimization. He is the recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER Award.

Liang's research has appeared in journals such as Econometrica, The Annals of Statistics, the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, the Journal of the American Statistical Association, the Journal of Machine Learning Research, and in leading peer-reviewed machine learning venues such as the Conference on Learning Theory (COLT), the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), among other outlets. His current research aims to: (1) bridge the empirical and theoretical gap in modern statistical learning; (2) understand optimization and inference of over-parametrized or infinite-dimensional statistical models; (3) explore the role of stochasticity in solving non-convex optimization.

Outside the University of Chicago, Liang has experience as a Research Scientist at Yahoo! Research in New York in 2016, working on large-scale machine learning applications. Liang visited the Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics at Yale University in 2019 as a short-term Visiting Professor in Econometrics. He is currently on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Machine Learning Research and the Senior Program Committee for the Conference on Learning Theory.

Liang earned a Ph.D. (in statistics) from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in 2017, and a B.Sc. (in mathematics and applied mathematics) from Peking University in China in 2012. He joined the Chicago Booth faculty in 2017.

Interests

• Statistical Inference
• Statistical Learning
• Stochastic Optimization
• Economic and Business Applications

Awards

• NSF CAREER Award, 2021-2026

• David G. Booth Faculty Fellow, William S. Fishman Faculty Scholar, 2021-2022

• George C. Tiao Faculty Fellowship, 2017-2021 for research in computational and data science

• J. Parker Memorial Bursk Award, 2016 for excellence in research

• US Junior Oberwolfach Fellow, 2015

• Winkelman Fellowship, 2014-2017 the highest honorific fellowship awarded by the Wharton School