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Class of 2026

Junbo (Jacob) Lian is an Operations and Artificial Intelligence researcher pursuing the Master of Science in Machine Learning and Data Science (MLDS) at Northwestern University (Aug 2025 – Dec 2026). He earned his Bachelor of Science in Data Science and Big Data Technology from Zhejiang A&F University in June 2025, where his undergraduate thesis was recognized as an Outstanding Undergraduate Thesis and he received the National Scholarship (Top 0.2% in China) in 2024. He will join the National University of Singapore's Institute of Operations Research and Analytics (IORA) as a PhD student in January 2027.

His research bridges operations research and modern AI, with interests in LLM-based optimization, data-driven retail pricing, and evolutionary computation. He has authored 25 papers in venues including Neural Networks, Expert Systems with Applications, Applied Soft Computing, International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence, Information Sciences, International Journal of Systems Science, and Computers in Biology and Medicine, with two ESI Top 0.1% Hot Papers and three ESI Top 1% Highly Cited Papers, plus the book Generative Foundation Models and four national invention patents as first-named inventor.

Junbo serves as Chief Analytics Officer at Wenzhou Buyi Pharmacy, a top-100 Chinese pharmaceutical retail chain, leading operations-research and LLM-enabled initiatives in pricing and inventory. He previously co-founded Hangzhou Bossway Testing Technology around a Chinese herbal medicine mold detection system featured by national media. He has reviewed for over ten international journals, including ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, Journal of Advanced Research, Swarm and Evolutionary Computation, and Knowledge-Based Systems, and has won over ten provincial and national provincial competition awards.