We are extremely pleased to announce that Herng Yi Cheng and Alik Sokolov has been awarded a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship.
Herng Yi obtained his Bachelor's degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is finishing his third year as a doctoral student in Riemannian Geometry and Quantitative Topology under the supervision of Regina Rotman and Alexander Nabutovsky.
Herng Yi writes: “I have greatly benefited from exchanging ideas with our department's community of faculty, postdocs and students in Geometric Analysis and adjacent fields. My mathematical horizons have also been broadened by the many diverse talks by our faculty and invited speakers. I am deeply grateful for the mentorship and guidance of Prof. Nabutovsky and Prof. Rotman”.
Alik’s academic background is in mathematical finance, with an undergraduate and Master’s degree from the University of Toronto, where Alik is now working on his PhD under the supervision of Prof. Luis Seco.
Alik’s research focus is at the intersection of machine learning and finance, and he has several publications on applying machine learning techniques to responsible investing, as well as other general problems in quantitative finance. Alik is also an educator in the machine learning field, teaching machine learning at the University of Toronto Master's of Mathematical Finance program. Alik also has close to ten years of professional experience, having worked in consulting as a machine learning lead, as an investor at a large venture capital fund, and most recently as CEO of his startup, SR.ai, building better tools for institutional investors to assess environmental, social, and governance impacts of their investments.