e [dot] honig [at] ucla.edu
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I recently received a Ph.D. in Statistics at UCLA, advised by Prof. Ying Nian Wu.
My principal research interests lie in generative models and representation learning. Earlier in my PhD I enjoyed working on learning energy-based models (EBMs). I spent a good chunk of time working more downstream on language modeling for biological sequences, including explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) works on gene expression prediction from DNA sequence. More recently, I have been delving (😉) deeper into language models for prompt compression and context extension. I am currently working on protein engineering and thinking more about reasoning.
I was a visiting graduate student researcher at the Cedars Sinai Zhang Lab of Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, advised by Prof. Zijun Zhang.
I interned at Cisco in Summer 2024, working on large-language models in the security domain.
I previously interned at intapp in Summer 2021 on the AI team.
I am also trying to share my thoughts online more frequently in my blog.
Feel free to reach out for any reason, especially to just say hi (email, social media, etc.). I have a great interest in people of all backgrounds and walks of life.
Last updated: 18 Jun 2025.
Lead Instructor
STATS 20: Introduction to Statistical Programming with R
Teaching Assistant
STATS 20: Introduction to Statistical Programming with R
STATS 21: Python and Other Technologies for Data Science
STATS 140XP: Introduction to Statistical Consulting
STATS 421: Advanced Statistical Communication