In February 2026, Weijie Su, a Class of 2007 undergraduate alumnus of Peking University's Mathematics program, was awarded the COPSS Presidents' Award, one of the most influential accolades in the international statistics community, in recognition of his outstanding contributions to the field of statistics.

The award was established in 1976 by the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies (COPSS). It is presented annually to only one statistician, aged 40 or below, in recognition of outstanding contributions to the statistics profession. It is widely recognized as the highest honor in the international statistics community. Previously, Peking University Mathematics alumni Jun Liu (Class of 1980) and Xingzhong Kou (Class of 1993) have also received the COPSS Presidents' Award.

Dr. Su is honored forstatistical foundations of generative AI including the watermarking, alignment, and rankings of LLMs; for advances in privacy preserving data analysis applied to the 2020 US Decennial Census; for improving peer review in machine learning; for foundational work in convex optimization; for wide‑ranging contributions to deep learning theory and high-dimensional inference.

Biography of Dr. Su

Weijie Su is an Associate Professor in the Wharton Statistics and Data Science Department and, by courtesy, in the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Informatics at the University of Pennsylvania. He serves as a Co-Director of the Penn Research in Machine Learning Center. He received his Ph.D. in Statistics from Stanford University in 2016 and his Bachelor's degree in Mathematics from Peking University in 2011. His research interests span the statistical foundations of generative AI, high-dimensional statistics, privacy-preserving data analysis, and optimization. He is a founding Co-Editor of the journal Statistical Learning and Data Science and serves as an Associate Editor for JASA, AOAS, JMLR, FnT in Statistics, Harvard Data Science Review, and Operations Research. He currently serves on the Organizing Committee of ICML 2026 as Scientific Integrity Chair, where his isotonic mechanism will be deployed to enhance peer review. His work has been recognized with many honors, including the Stanford Theodore Anderson Dissertation Award, NSF CAREER Award, Sloan Research Fellowship, IMS Peter Hall Prize, SIAM Early Career Prize in Data Science, ASA Noether Early Career Award, ICBS Frontiers of Science Award in Mathematics, IMS Medallion Lectureship, and the Outstanding Young Talent Award in the 2025 China Annual Review of Mathematics. He has authored two discussion papers in JRSSB and JASA and is a Fellow of the IMS.

For details, visit the official announcement: https://community.amstat.org/copss/awards/presidents