SDSCon is a celebration and community-building event for those interested in statistics and data science. Discussions will cover applications of statistics and data science across a wide range of fields and approaches. The event is organized by the Statistics and Data Science Center (SDSC), an MIT-wide focal point for advancing academic programs and research activities in statistics and data science that is part of the MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS).
Speakers
Alex Damian is a research fellow at the Kempner Institute at Harvard University and will join MIT in Fall 2026 as an assistant professor in Mathematics and EECS[AI+D]. His research focuses on the mathematical foundations of deep learning, with an emphasis on optimization dynamics and representation learning. He received his Ph.D. in Applied and Computational Mathematics from Princeton University, where he was advised by Jason D. Lee, and his B.S. in Mathematics from Duke University. His work has been supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and the Jane Street Graduate Research Fellowship.
Dr. Yuting Wei is an Associate Professor in the Department of Statistics and Data Science at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to joining Penn in 2021, she spent two years as an Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University and one year at Stanford University as a Stein Fellow. She received her Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Wei is a recipient of the 2025 Gottfried E. Noether Early Career Scholar Award, the Google Research Scholar Award, the NSF CAREER Award, and the Erich L. Lehmann Citation from the Berkeley Statistics Department. Her research interests lie in learning from high-dimensional and structured data, and advancing the theoretical foundations of reinforcement learning and diffusion models.