Sam Zhang's Homepage
I am a PhD student and NSF Graduate Research Fellow in the Department of Applied Mathematics at the University of Colorado at Boulder. My advisor is Aaron Clauset. Recently, I was a summer research intern with the Computational Social Science group at Microsoft Research NYC.
My research is in computational social science and applied and interdisciplinary statistics more broadly. I also love making mathematical visualizations, many of which are on display below.
Pronouns: he/him.
Visualizations
Check out this recent visualization I made with Matt Harvey and Satyan Devadoss, on the ridge unfoldings of different four-dimensional polytopes!
More visualizations are available below:
Updates
- (September, 2021) Sage Shaw, Dan Messenger, and I launched a graduate seminar for the Applied Math department. I gave the September 22nd talk on "The fun and joy of static word embeddings". Slides.
- (July, 2021) Gave a talk at IC2S2 on recent work on the role of graduate and postdoctoral labor in driving faculty productivity.
- (May, 2021) Excited to be a research intern this summer at Microsoft Research NYC with Jake Hofman and Dan Goldstein in the Computational Social Science group.
- (January, 2021) I have successfully completed my PhD program's preliminary exam requirements (in probability/statistics, analysis, and numerics).
- (August, 2020) I volunteered as a Lead Project Scoper for the 2020 Solve for Good Summer. I scoped several projects, like this UNICEF project on air pollution and COVID.
- (July, 2020) I presented recent work on scientific productivity at IC2S2.
- (May, 2020) New preprint: Jointly modeling prevalence, sensitivity and specificity for optimal sample allocation.
- (April, 2020) New (first!) preprint. I was awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.
- (March, 2020) I gave the March 3rd topology seminar talk on discrete Morse theory. Slides.