School of Business Ph.D. Students

Vahid Ashrafi is a Ph.D. candidate in information systems and data analytics, with extensive experience in behavioral economics, cognitive modeling and the application 2 of 9 of AI in decision-making. He has also worked as a research fellow, corporate leader and academic, focusing on cognitive biases, human-computer interaction and decision support systems.

Zihan Chen is a final-year data science Ph.D. student, whose research focuses on fintech, information systems (IS), and graph representation learning. His work has been published in top IS and operations management conferences. Zihan also works as a research intern at leading financial companies (Jefferies, AllianceBernstein) and tech firms (Amazon).

Zhiyang Deng is currently a Ph.D. candidate in financial engineering whose research interests include risk-averse stochastic control, mean field games, and deep reinforcement learning. His research also encompasses fintech, notably focusing on large language models (LLMs) for financial applications.

Kexin Gu is a Ph.D. candidate in finance. She earned my master’s degree in statistics from Columbia University and completed a bachelor’s degree with a double major in mathematics and economics at Southwestern University of Finance and Economics.

Jingyun Huang is a Ph.D. candidate in marketing under the guidance of Professor Gaurav Sabnis. Her research focuses on the social media data analysis and text analysis.

Zequn Li is a Ph.D. candidate in financial engineering, specializing in empirical asset pricing and interpretable machine learning. Her research explores the dynamics between firm characteristics and stock returns, with an expanding interest in fintech and financial analytics.

Lun Li, a Ph.D. student in data science, specializes in large language models, predictive modeling and dynamic graph modeling.

William Long holds a B.S. in pure mathematics from North Carolina State University and an M.S. in mathematical finance from UNC Charlotte. He is a Ph.D. candidate in financial engineering. With nearly a decade of experience in education and finance, he is seeking a position in the finance industry.

Cheng Lu is a Ph.D. candidate in financial engineering, specializing in asset allocation, risk management and machine learning applications. He has published in the International Review of Financial Analysis and presented at major conferences, including FMA and INFORMS.

Hongju Red is a Ph.D. candidate in finance. Her research interests include mutual funds, behavioral finance, culture and investor behavior, corporate finance, ESG and fintech.

Agathe Sadeghi is a Ph.D. candidate in financial engineering supervised by Dr. Zachary Feinstein. Her research focuses on network theory and risk factors, with applications in trading and portfolio management. She also explores causal discovery and inference to identify potential drivers of different asset classes. She is an instructor at Stevens, where she teaches the financial database course to graduate students.

Ruijing Yang is a Ph.D. candidate in financial engineering, with a strong background in quantitative analysis, financial modeling and computational finance. She is experienced in programming (Python, C++) and developing quantitative strategies for optimal portfolio execution.

Zhiyuan Yao holds a Ph.D. in financial engineering and a bachelor's degree in mathematics. His research focuses on the application of deep learning and reinforcement learning to solve financial trading problems, aiming to develop innovative solutions for the industry.

Mingsong Ye is a Ph.D. candidate in data science. He specializes in optimization (mixed integer programming), Bayesian inference and uncertainty quantization.

Yangyang Yu, Ph.D. candidate in data science and earned her master’s degree at Syracuse University. Her research integrates cognitive science, language agent design, Bayesian statistics and multimodal learning, focusing on fintech applications. She serves as a program committee member and an organizer for workshops at ACM AI in Finance, IJCAI and COLING. She also serves as a reviewer of NeurIPS, ICLR, AISTATS, ICASSP, CogSci, UIST, etc.