Rate My Professor Will Wei Sun

Will Wei Sun is Associate Professor of Quantitative Methods and Statistics (courtesy) in the Daniels School of Business at Purdue University, where he also serves as PhD Coordinator of Quantitative Methods. He received his Ph.D. in Statistics from Purdue University in 2015, M.S. in Statistics and Computer Science from Purdue University in 2014, M.S. in Statistics from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2011, and B.S. in Statistics from Nankai University in 2009. He was a visiting student in the Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering at Princeton University from 2014 to 2015. Sun's prior appointments include Assistant Professor of Management Science at the Miami Herbert Business School from 2016 to 2019, Research Scientist in the Advertising Science team at Yahoo Research from 2015 to 2016, and Assistant Professor at Purdue from 2019 to 2023.

Sun's research interests encompass statistical foundations of large language models, trustworthy reinforcement learning, online decision-making in two-sided markets, and neuroimaging analysis, with applications in business analytics, data mining, machine learning, and pricing. His publications appear in premier outlets such as the Journal of the American Statistical Association, Operations Research, Annals of Statistics, and Journal of Machine Learning Research. Select works include "Online Tensor Inference" (Operations Research, 2025), "Low-Rank Online Dynamic Assortment with Dual Contextual Information" (Journal of the American Statistical Association, 2025), "Fairness-aware Contextual Dynamic Pricing with Strategic Buyers" (Journal of the American Statistical Association, 2026), "Provable Sparse Tensor Decomposition" (Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series B, 2016; 167 citations), "STORE: Sparse Tensor Response Regression and Neuroimaging Analysis" (Journal of Machine Learning Research, 2017; 155 citations), and "Dynamic Tensor Clustering" (Journal of the American Statistical Association, 2018; 108 citations). He has obtained grants from the National Science Foundation ($450,000; 2022-2025), Office of Naval Research ($150,000; 2020-2022), and others. Awards include University Faculty Scholar (2026-2031), Salgo-Noren Outstanding Master’s Teaching Award (2025), first runner-up (2023, 2024), Distinguished Instructor (2019-2024), Jay N. Ross Young Faculty Scholar (2020-2021), multiple American Statistical Association Student Paper Awards (2021-2026), and Adobe Research Gift Award (2019). Sun teaches MGMT 571 Data Mining, MGMT 670 Business Analytics, and MGMT 590 Reinforcement Learning and Large Language Models. His former PhD students hold positions at Yale University, OpenAI, Amazon, Walmart Global Tech, and faculty roles at universities including Shanghai University of Finance and Economics and City University of Hong Kong. He serves as Associate Editor for Annals of Applied Statistics (2025-) and was Visiting Faculty at MIT's Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (2025).