PhD Students' Research Wins 2nd Place in Poster Competition
October 29, 2026
Qijie Zhu, a PhD student in the Department of Statistics and Data Science at Northwestern University, received Second Place in the Student Poster Competition at the 2026 NIC-ASA and ICSA Midwest Chapter Joint Fall Meeting, held October 15–16, 2026, in Northbrook, Illinois.
The award-winning poster showcased collaborative research by Qijie Zhu and Ziqing Wang on theoretically grounded and computationally efficient methods for adapting pretrained diffusion models to new objectives without additional training. The research builds on Doob's h-transform, change of measure, and probability transport to develop principled methods for diffusion guidance. Their work brings together several approaches, including DOIT, D-DOIT, and DiMOS, with applications spanning reinforcement learning and biological sequence design.
The Department of Statistics and Data Science congratulates Qijie and Ziqing on this achievement!