Yongkai Chen Receives 2026 STAI-X Outstanding Paper Award

The Harvard Statistics Department is thrilled to share that Postdoctoral Fellow Yongkai Chen has been selected to receive the 2026 STAI-X Outstanding Paper Award.  Chen will be presented the award at the upcoming Statistics and Trustworthy AI for Cross (X)-Domain Acceleration Conference hosted by the Harvard Departments of Statistics and Biostatistics from July 31 to August 1, 2026. 

Chen and his co-authors, Wenxuan Zhong (University of Georgia) and Ping Ma (University of Georgia), received this award for their paper "Wahkon: A Statistically Principled Deep RKHS Superposition Network." 

In partnership with several leading statistical organizations and journals, as well as the StatsUpAI Interest Group of the American Statistical Association, the STAI-X Conference advances the integration of statistics and AI to accelerate trustworthy cross-domain discovery, innovation, and collaboration with broad impact.  

Congratulations, Yongkai, on receiving this award!