Weijie Su, an Associate Professor of Statistics and Data Science at the Wharton School and affiliated faculty with the Wharton AI and Analytics Initiative, recently received the 2026 Presidents’ Award from the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies (COPSS). The award is considered to be one of the highest honors in the field of statistics and recognizes Su for his outstanding contributions to the discipline. 

Su was selected for his wide-ranging and foundational contributions to statistics and machine learning. His work has advanced the statistical foundations of generative AI, including large language models. His breakthroughs in privacy-preserving data analysis have demonstrated the potential to significantly enhance the accuracy of the 2020 U.S. Decennial Census. Recent research shows his methods could reduce noise injection by 15% to 24% while maintaining privacy guarantees, as reported by New Scientist. As Integrity Chair for ICML 2026, one of the world’s premier AI conferences, Su also designed an innovative, game-theory-based “Isotonic Mechanism” for author self-ranking that has significantly improved the peer review process in AI research, as featured in Nature Index. He has also made foundational contributions to convex optimization and driven significant advances in deep learning theory and high-dimensional inference.

Established in 1976, COPSS sponsors and presents the Presidents’ Award annually at the Joint Statistical Meetings to a young member of the statistical community. The award includes a plaque and a cash award. It’s jointly sponsored by the five leading statistical societies in North America: American Statistical Association, Institute of Mathematical Statistics, Statistical Society of Canada, Eastern North American Region International Biometric Society, and Western North American Region of The International Biometric Society.

In addition to his appointment at the Wharton School, Su also holds secondary appointments in the Department of Computer and Information Science and the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Informatics at the University of Pennsylvania. Su also serves as a co-director of the Penn Research in Machine Learning Center. He obtained his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2016 and received his bachelor’s degree from Peking University in 2011.