e [dot] honig [at] ucla.edu
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I am a Ph.D. candidate at UCLA in the Statistics Department, advised by Prof. Ying Nian Wu, likely obtaining my Ph.D. in June 2025.
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: 06 Apr 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