Peking University, August 10, 2026: Su Weijie, an alumnus of the 2007 cohort of Peking University's School of Mathematical Sciences, received the COPSS Presidents' Award on the afternoon of August 5 at the Joint Statistical Meetings in Boston. Established in 1976 by five leading statistical societies, the award is often called the “Nobel Prize of Statistics” and recognizes one outstanding young statistician each year.
Su Weijie (right) was presented with the COPSS Presidents' Award
Su is a professor of statistics and data science at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Throughout his academic career, he has crossed paths with all recipients of the 2026 Fields Medal. He studied at Peking University in the same cohort as Wang Hong and Deng Yu, pursued graduate studies at Stanford University alongside John Pardon, and currently collaborates with Jacob Tsimerman at OpenAI.
In his acceptance speech, Su thanked mentors at Peking University and Stanford, including his doctoral advisor, Emmanuel Candès, and reflected on statistics' expanding role in the AI era, arguing that growing data and uncertainty would only heighten the field's importance.
The award committee cited Su's contributions across statistical foundations for generative AI, differential privacy, machine learning theory, and high-dimensional inference. His work has informed the U.S. Census Bureau's 2020 data disclosure methods and led to the "Isotonic Mechanism," a peer-review tool adopted by the ICML conference in 2026.
Su is the first Chinese statistician to win the award since 2012. Three months after his selection was announced in February, he took academic leave from Wharton to join OpenAI, where he hopes to help develop a mathematical theory for artificial intelligence systems.
Written by: Tiffany Yap En Tong
Edited by: Chen Shizhuo
