Ph.D. Student Agathe teaches a lesson in Hanlon Lab, pointing at charts on a smart screen.

School of Business - Ph.D. Students

Candidates Who are Shaping the Future of Business

At the Stevens School of Business, we are proud to cultivate Ph.D. candidates who apply leading-edge technologies and methodologies to solve complex financial and technical challenges. These talented candidates are advancing research in their areas of study and shaping the future of business.

We are pleased to share the work and contributions of our fifth-year Ph.D. candidates. These scholars demonstrate exceptional expertise across a variety of key business areas, including:

  • Financial Engineering

  • Fintech

  • Machine Learning

  • Portfolio Management

  • Quantitative Analysis

Meet our Fifth-Year Ph.D. Candidates

Headshot of Vahid Ashrafi

Vahid Ashrafi

Vahid Ashrafi is a Ph.D. candidate in information systems and data analytics, with extensive experience in behavioral economics, cognitive modeling and the application 2 of 9 of AI in decision-making. He has also worked as a research fellow, corporate leader and academic, focusing on cognitive biases, human-computer interaction and decision support systems.

Headshot of Zihan Chen

Zihan Chen

Zihan Chen is a final-year data science Ph.D. student, whose research focuses on fintech, information systems (IS), and graph representation learning. His work has been published in top IS and operations management conferences. Zihan also works as a research intern at leading financial companies (Jefferies, AllianceBernstein) and tech firms (Amazon).

Zhiyang Deng

Zhiyang Deng

Zhiyang Deng is currently a Ph.D. candidate in financial engineering whose research interests include risk-averse stochastic control, mean field games, and deep reinforcement learning. His research also encompasses fintech, notably focusing on large language models (LLMs) for financial applications.

Headshot of Kexin Gu

Kexin Gu

Kexin Gu is a Ph.D. candidate in finance. She earned my master’s degree in statistics from Columbia University and completed a bachelor’s degree with a double major in mathematics and economics at Southwestern University of Finance and Economics.

Headshot of Jingyun Huang

Jingyun Huang

Jingyun Huang is a Ph.D. candidate in marketing under the guidance of Professor Gaurav Sabnis. Her research focuses on the social media data analysis and text analysis.

Headshot of Zequn Li

Zequn Li

Zequn Li is a Ph.D. candidate in financial engineering, specializing in empirical asset pricing and interpretable machine learning. Her research explores the dynamics between firm characteristics and stock returns, with an expanding interest in fintech and financial analytics.

Headshot of William Long

William Long

William Long holds a B.S. in pure mathematics from North Carolina State University and an M.S. in mathematical finance from UNC Charlotte. He is a Ph.D. candidate in financial engineering. With nearly a decade of experience in education and finance, he is seeking a position in the finance industry.

Headshot of Cheng Lu

Cheng Lu

Cheng Lu is a Ph.D. candidate in financial engineering, specializing in asset allocation, risk management and machine learning applications. He has published in the International Review of Financial Analysis and presented at major conferences, including FMA and INFORMS.

Headshot of Hongju Ren

Hongju Ren

Hongju Red is a Ph.D. candidate in finance. Her research interests include mutual funds, behavioral finance, culture and investor behavior, corporate finance, ESG and fintech.

Agathe Sadeghi, PhD grad, Bloomberg Speaker

Agathe Sadeghi

Agathe Sadeghi is a Ph.D. candidate in financial engineering supervised by Dr. Zachary Feinstein. Her research focuses on network theory and risk factors, with applications in trading and portfolio management. She also explores causal discovery and inference to identify potential drivers of different asset classes. She is an instructor at Stevens, where she teaches the financial database course to graduate students.

Headshot of Ruijing Yang

Ruijing Yang

Ruijing Yang is a Ph.D. candidate in financial engineering, with a strong background in quantitative analysis, financial modeling and computational finance. She is experienced in programming (Python, C++) and developing quantitative strategies for optimal portfolio execution.

Headshot of Yangyang Yu

Yangyang Yu

Yangyang Yu, Ph.D. candidate in data science and earned her master’s degree at Syracuse University. Her research integrates cognitive science, language agent design, Bayesian statistics and multimodal learning, focusing on fintech applications. She serves as a program committee member and an organizer for workshops at ACM AI in Finance, IJCAI and COLING. She also serves as a reviewer of NeurIPS, ICLR, AISTATS, ICASSP, CogSci, UIST, etc.

Headshot of Zhiyuan Yao

Zhiyuan Yao

Zhiyuan Yao holds a Ph.D. in financial engineering and a bachelor's degree in mathematics. His research focuses on the application of deep learning and reinforcement learning to solve financial trading problems, aiming to develop innovative solutions for the industry.

Headshot of Mingsong Ye

Mingsong Ye

Mingsong Ye is a Ph.D. candidate in data science. He specializes in optimization (mixed integer programming), Bayesian inference and uncertainty quantization.