Tianjiao Ding
PhD Student • Innovation in Data Engineering and Science (IDEAS) • University of Pennsylvania • Email: tjding@upenn.edu
Hi there! I am a PhD candidate at University of Pennsylvania, advised by René Vidal. I work closely with Benjamin D. Haeffele and Yi Ma. Prior to my PhD, I was a research assistant at ShanghaiTech University, advised by Manolis C. Tsakiris and collaborating with Laurent Kneip. I received a master’s degree in applied mathematics and statistics from Johns Hopkins University, and a bachelor’s in computer science with honor from ShanghaiTech.
My research interests center on theoretical foundations of machine learning and emerging applications. On one hand, I use mathematics to understand when and why existing empirical paradigms work. On the other hand, these insights allow me to develop practical algorithms that are more robust, trustworthy, and efficient. As such, my work typically involves theory, controlled simulations, and large-scale applications.
I am on the 2026 job market. Happy to chat if you see a good fit for your lab, organization, or institute! You may view my CV and papers clustered by keywords.
Reaching out to me
I am glad to chat about research, advising, collaborations, life, and fun.
Undergraduate and MS students: If you are interested in doing research with me, feel free to contact me. The recommended time investment is at least 15 hours per week. Students I have mentored have gone on to PhD programs at UC Berkeley, Hong Kong University, MIT, NYU, and to full-time roles at Google and Meta.
Updates
| Jan 2026 | I am honored to receive the Penn AI Fellowship and CPAL Rising Stars Award! |
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| Feb 2025 | One paper accepted to ICLR ‘25 as a Spotlight paper! |
| Sep 2024 | Two papers accepted to NeurIPS ‘24 (Vancouver)! |
Papers
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Geometric Analysis of Nonlinear Manifold ClusteringIn Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, 2024 -
Unsupervised Manifold Linearizing and ClusteringIn International Conference on Computer Vision, 2023