EDUCATION AND INTERNSHIPS
Columbia University
Master of Operations Research
Courses: Optimization, Business Analysis
New York, NY
Sep 2023- Current
University of British Columbia (UBC), Faculty of Science
B.Sc. in Statistics
Courses: Quantitative Economic Modelling, Methods for Statistical Learning, Introduction to Data Science
Vancouver, BC
Sep 2017 – May 2023
INTERNSHIPS
Accenture
Business Analyst Intern
Hong Kong, China
Sep 2022 – Dec 2022
- Partnered with multi-functional teams to track, collect and onboard 700k+ operations data onto a centralized data repository via streamlined ETL pipelines, improved downstream data analysis efficiency by 50%
- Collaborated with investment managers to identify the 20+ key metrics and built comprehensive visualizations via Tableau and SQL to derive timely insights, supported client’s data-driven investment decisions
- Assisted with the development of a scalable anomaly detection monitoring system via Python and SQL, improved operational efficiency by 30% by mitigating human error and minimizing efforts from repetitive work
- Performed end-to-end funnel and segmentation analysis to understand the adoption of investment recommendations by institutional investors, help drive actionable strategy to support digital transformation
KABU Inc.
Data Scientist Intern
Vancouver, BC
May 2022 – Sep 2022
- Performed in-depth sentiment analysis leveraging NLP technique and developed a clustering model with customer feedback data pre-processing, feature engineering, model training and tuning via by-weekly annotation
- Adopted deep learning algorithms including Heterogeneous Attentions and GNN to quantify the potential area the drivers should stay to optimize the cost efficiency and customer await experience
- Collaborated with UX designer to conduct A/B testing and identified the optimized UI design to prompt customers to engage with the real-time features and adopt the personalized promotions
- Applied fixed effects, LASSO and ridge regression models to identify root causes of customer churn, drove 8% increase in customer retention
PROJECTS
Simon Fraser University, Data Research Assistant
June 2022 – Present
- Automated data collection processes with R and spearheaded a 6-person team to clean 1.3 TB of data extracted from website(Edger, FEC, Beijing Financial Assets Exchange).
- Performed textual analysis based on NLP techniques in Python, such as LDA and KL divergence, to identify finance-related topics within the text data.
- Built a project GitHub Repo to facilitate collaboration among the team, and initiated quality checks on codes produced by team members, and proactively resolved team conflicts via effective communication.
- Applied various ML methods (ridge, lasso, OLS regressions and elastic network) to predict the top 100 portfolios with the highest risks along with their returns and adjusted the hyperparameters to maximize model performance
UBC, Data Research Assistant
Jan 2022 – Apr 2023
- Preprocessed 4 GB data extracted from a genetic dataset with Excel build-in functions (Vlookup, ifelse, etc.).
- Carried out descriptive analysis on genetic datasets using R and ran statistic testings (t-test, Pearson correlation test) with stats, tidyr, and tidyverse packages.
- Implemented illustrative analysis with heatmaps and bar plots by employing seaborn and pandas in R and crosschecked analytical outcomes between graphs and the model’s results.
PUBLISH
- Zhang S, Patel A, Rizvi SA, Liu N, He S, Karbasi A, Zappala E, van Dijk D. Intelligence at the Edge of Chaos. Preprint submitted to ICLR 2025. arXiv:2410.02536 [cs.LG]. https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.02536
- Zhou C, Han S, Zhang S, Weng S, Liu Z, Jin C. RankAdaptor: Hierarchical Dynamic Low-Rank Adaptation for Structural Pruned LLMs. Preprint submitted to NeurIPS 2024. arXiv:2406.15734 [cs.CL]. https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.15734
- Chen Y, Zhang S, Du S, Jiang J, Wang G. Transcriptome and Metabonomic Analysis of Tamarix ramosissima Potassium (K+) Channels and Transporters in Response to NaCl Stress. Genes. 2022; 13(8):1313. https://doi.org/10.3390/genes13081313
- Chen Y, Zhang S, Du S, Zhang X, Jiang J, Wang G. Analysis of Amino Acids in the Roots of Tamarix ramosissima by Application of Exogenous Potassium (K+) under NaCl Stress. International Journal of Molecular Sciences. 2022; 23(16):9331. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms23169331
- Chen Y, Li H, Zhang S, Du S, Wang G, Zhang J, Jiang J. Analysis of the Antioxidant Mechanism of Tamarix ramosissima Roots under NaCl Stress Based on Physiology, Transcriptomic and Metabolomic. Antioxidants. 2022; 11(12):2362. https://doi.org/10.3390/antiox11122362
- Chen Y, Zhang S, Du S, Wang G, Zhang J, Jiang J. Effects of Exogenous (K+) Potassium Application on Plant Hormones in the Roots of Tamarix ramosissima under NaCl Stress. Genes. 2022; 13(10):1803. https://doi.org/10.3390/genes13101803
- Chen Y, Zhang S, Du S, Zhang X, Wang G, Huang J, Jiang J. Effects of Exogenous Potassium (K+) Application on the Antioxidant Enzymes Activities in Leaves of Tamarix ramosissima under NaCl Stress. Genes. 2022; 13(9):1507. https://doi.org/10.3390/genes13091507
- Chen Y, Li H, Zhang S, et al. Analysis of the main antioxidant enzymes in the roots of Tamarix ramosissima under NaCl stress by applying exogenous potassium (K+). Frontiers in Plant Science. 2023;14. doi:https://doi.org/10.3389/fpls.2023.1114266
SKILLS
Software
- R Studio
- Python
- SQL
- Tableau
- Latex
- Microsoft Office Suite
- AWS
- Google Analytics
Programming Languages
- Python (NumPy, Pandas, Scikit-learn, Matplotlib, selenium, webdriver)
- R(Tydiverse, NLP)
- Java
- C++
- VBA
- Git