The UC Berkeley Department of Statistics celebrated the graduates of the class of 2025 on Wednesday, May 22nd, at Zellerbach Playhouse on the Berkeley campus. Department Chair Haiyan Huang led commencement activities, which featured an address by Nobel Laureate Guido Imbens.

Prize Winners

Department Citation in the Statistics Bachelor's Program
The Department Citation (B.A.) is given in recognition of outstanding undergraduate work at the bachelor's level and exceptional performance in the program. The 2025 winner is Jianzhi Wang.

Department Citation in the Statistics Master's Program
Given the recognition of excellence in the theory and application of statistics at the master's level and outstanding performance in the master's program, the 2025 winner is Ozioma-Jesus Damisi Philip Anyanwu.

MA Statistics Community Leadership Award
This award honors a student who has demonstrated outstanding leadership, initiative, and commitment to building a more inclusive, supportive, and engaged community within the MA Statistics program. The recipient has gone above and beyond their academic responsibilities to serve others through mentorship, outreach, peer engagement, and a deep investment in shaping the future of the program. The 2025 winner is Junya Tsuneishi.

Eric L. Lehman Citation
Established in 1999, this prize consists of a gift certificate for a scientific book and a citation. It is awarded for an outstanding Ph.D. dissertation in theoretical statistics (interpreted broadly). Saptarshi Chakraborty is the 2025 Lehman winner.

Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award
The Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor (OGSI) Award honors UC Berkeley GSIs each year for their outstanding work in teaching on the Berkeley campus. These OGSI recipients are nominated from within their teaching departments. The GSI Teaching & Resource Center provides the award recipients certificates of distinction and hosts a celebratory ceremony in the spring. This award is sponsored by the GSI Teaching & Resource Center. The 2025 winners are:

• Mriganka Basu Roy Chowdhury
• Tiffany Ding
• Adam Jaffe
• Lauren Murai
• Anthony Ozerov
• Annie Ulichney

Ph.D. Class of 2025

Abhineet Agarwal

" Interpretable Machine Learning and Trustworthy Uncertainty Quantification"

Advised By: Professor Bin Yu

Alexander Asemota

"Metrics and Evaluation Tools for Socially Positive Systems"

Advised By: Professors Giles Hooker & Philip Stark
 

Saptarshi Chakraborty

"On the Statistical Properties of Deep Learners for Intrinsically Low Dimensional Data"

Advised By: Professor Peter L. Bartlett

Omer Ronen

“Understanding and Improving Stability for Biomedical Machine‑Learning Algorithms”

Advised By: Professor Bin Yu

Jordan Lekeufack Sopze 

“Safe Sequential Decision-Making in Adversarial Environments”

Advised By:  Professor Michael I. Jordan

Huong Vu

“Bridging AI and Clinical Practice: Deep Learning Applications for Advanced Diagnosis in Breast, Pancreatic, and Viral Diseases"

Advised By: Professors Haiyan Huang, Ziad Obermeyer &  Iain Carmichael

Biostatistics Ph.D. 

Kevin Kiane Jacques Benac 

“Unified Analysis of Two-Stage Experiments from the Design-Based Perspective”

Advised By: Professors Peng Ding, Sam Pimentel & Jingshen Wang

Junming Seraphina Shi

"Advanced Biostatistical Machine Learning for Complex Biomedical Data: Causal Dose-Response Curve Estimation, ICU EHR Bias and Missing Data Evaluation, and Cancer-Drug Biclustering and Response Prediction"

Advised By:  Professors Haiyan Huang & Alan Hubbard

Lei Shi

" Design-Based Causal Inference for Randomized Experiments: A Unified Framework for a Diverging Number of Treatment Arms and Varying Sample Sizes”

Advised By:  Professors Peng Ding & Jingshen Wang

Yunzhe Zhou

" Robust Inference and Interpretability in Complex Statistical Models: From Model Distillation to Targeted Learning”

Advised By:  Professor Giles Hooker

Commencement Address - Professor Guido Imbens

Professor Guido Imbens is a groundbreaking, Nobel Prize-winning economist whose research in statistics and Econometrics has earned him international recognition and helped shape the direction of economics in the 21st century. After earning degrees from the University of Hull and Brown, Imbens has had faculty positions at Tilburg University, Harvard, UCLA, and, of course, here at Berkeley. He currently serves as a professor of applied econometrics and economics at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He is also a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and a professor of economics at the institute's School of Humanities and Sciences. Imbens’ research is unique for its foundational contributions to causal inference using observational data, primarily through formalizing how we understand and estimate treatment effects with instrumental variables and other quasi-experimental designs. He helped to shape modern empirical economics and policy evaluation.

Chair Haiyan Huang on the class of 2025

Today is a day to celebrate and reflect upon the incredible accomplishments of the Class of 2025. While we are always proud of our graduates, the Class of 2025 deserves special recognition for overcoming challenges inside and outside the classroom. 

Today’s world is full of complex issues that we must face with unity. While we are more connected than ever, large gulfs exist between us as a global community.  As graduates of the Class of 2025, you are stepping into this world as the next generation of thinkers, leaders, and problem-solvers, poised to help shape its future.

As graduates of the Statistics Department, you are uniquely positioned to lead at the intersection of data and society. Your training in statistics and data science equips you to contribute meaningfully across a wide range of domains—technology, healthcare, finance, the sciences, public policy, criminal justice, sports, and more.

Use your knowledge to draw insights from data, to advocate for ethical and responsible practices, and to help build a more just and informed world. The challenges ahead are great, but so is your potential to make a difference. We're proud of you, Class of 2025, and we’re counting on you to lead with integrity, insight, and impact.

Where are our grads going next 

• Akuna Capital
• Bloomberg
• Business Operations Associate at ZetaChain
• Carnegie Mellon University
• Columbia University
• Deutsche Bank
• Doordash
• Epic Healthcare Systems
• Goldman Sachs
• Harvard
• Hulu
• Kaiser Permanente
• MIT
• Stanford
• Susquehanna International Group
• SIG
• UCLA
• University of Chicago
• University of Michigan
• Yale