People / Students / Class of 2026
Yihao Chen graduated from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign with a dual major in Statistics and Sociology, where she engaged in both quantitative and qualitative research. This interdisciplinary foundation shaped her approach to data, allowing her to see it not only as numbers to be modeled but also as reflections of human behavior and social context. Alongside her studies, she pursued independent projects in natural language processing, experimenting with Hugging Face models to build course recommendation systems and explore how text data can generate new insights.
Professionally, Yihao has completed data and product-related internships across tech, advertising, and AI startups, gaining experience in both B2B and B2C contexts. In these roles, she contributed to analytics, product strategy, and AI product management, where she became particularly interested in how emerging paradigms such as vibe coding and multi-agent workflows are reshaping human–AI interaction. These experiences also highlighted for her the importance of tailoring insights to different target audiences and showed how data-driven approaches can guide strategy, product design, and decision-making to create meaningful impact across industries and society.
Beyond academics and professional work, Yihao enjoys experimenting in the kitchen, from recreating traditional Chinese dishes to trying new recipes from different cultures. She is passionate about travel and often explores new places through their food and local traditions. She also enjoys doing some personal invests in the stock market, an interest that sharpens her analytical mindset and deepens her curiosity about data-driven financial decision-making.
