Applied Mathematics, PhD Candidate @ Stanford University
“The more we wander, the more we find pieces of ourselves scattered across the world.”
“We come to seek, we uncover the unknown. In doing so, we weave deeper connections with one another and inscribe our presence into the fabric of time.”
About
Hi, I’m Xin, a PhD student at Stanford University. Previously, I studied math at ETH Zurich, completing both my Bachelor’s and Master’s in just 3 years.
Growing up between China and Switzerland, I learned to navigate two cultures and four languages. I find joy in reading, learning, meditation, and sports, and find my deepest sense of peace in moments of complete presence—whether in stillness or in flow.
Experience
2023 – Present: PhD @ Stanford University, ICME (Institute of Computational and Mathematical Engineering)
- Current Research:
- With Ruizhe Jia, Stanford AFTLab
- Our lab studies the theory and empirical behavior of financial marketplaces, including their economics, participant-level trading performance, and the pricing of newer assets such as pre-IPO and tokenized stocks. Platforms like Hyperliquid and Polymarket provide unusually detailed on-chain records of orders, positions, and trading outcomes. By bridging these on-chain records with traditional financial data with machine learning and agentic methods to generate, test and refine trading hypotheses, we pursue alpha research that informs better investment theses and systematic trading algorithms for traditional markets.
- Research Rotations:
- With Marco Pavone: on Transformers for Trajectory Optimization
- With David Tse: on Consensus Protocols
2022 – 2023: Mathematics M.S. @ ETH Zurich, Research in Random Matrix Theory
2022 Fall: Exchange @ Princeton University, Courses in Graph Theory, Combinatorial Optimization, Research in Convex Geometry
2020 – 2022: Mathematics B.S. @ ETH Zurich, Research in Numerical Analysis & Random Matrix Theory
Publications
Who Loses and Why? Market Microstructure of Perpetual Futures
(With Ruizhe Jia, Ciamac C. Moallemi and Shouqiao Wang, 2026)
Transmission properties of space-time modulated metamaterials
(Bachelor’s Thesis with Prof. Habib Ammari, Studies in Applied Mathematics)
On the concentration of Gaussian Cayley matrices
(Project with Prof. Afonso Bandeira, Applied and Computational Harmonic Analysis)
The extremals of the Kahn-Saks inequality
(Project with Prof. Ramon Van Handel, Advances in Mathematics)
A Matrix Concentration Inequality for Products of Independent Gaussian Matrices
(Master’s thesis with Prof. Afonso Bandeira, not yet published)
Skills
Programming Languages
Python
Matlab
Julia
ROS
Natural Languages
Chinese (native)
French (proficient)
English (proficient)
German (advanced)
Japanese (intermediate)