Youjia Zhang is a Graduate Coach and a Master’s student in Biostatistics at Harvard University. She graduated from the University of Rochester with degrees in Data Science, Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and Psychology, and a minor in Mathematics, earning a 3.86 GPA and a place on the Dean’s List in all eight semesters.
Her research sits at the intersection of data science, neuroscience, and mental health. At the University of Rochester Medical Center she engineered MATLAB pipelines that turned high-frequency eye-tracking recordings into analysis-ready data, classifying microsaccades and revealing schizophrenia-related differences in fixation stability, work that supported a peer-reviewed Journal of Vision abstract and conference presentations. She also built containerized workflows to batch-process confocal microscopy datasets and benchmark segmentation tools for neuroinflammatory research, documenting reproducible methods for an open-source manuscript in preparation. Her wider project work includes a Random Forest model of mental health prevalence across 196 countries that reached 0.98 AUC, and an end-to-end Python and large-language-model pipeline that turns unstructured company news into structured portfolio risk reports.
Outside research, Youjia has held leadership roles in the University of Rochester Chinese Student Organization and directed, produced, and acted with the XTG Theater Group, and she interned with GroupM in Shanghai, where she analyzed campaign performance and presented data-informed recommendations to the team. As a Graduate Coach, she is especially interested in helping students identify their strengths and make thoughtful academic and professional decisions, and she brings the same structured, evidence-led thinking to an application that she brings to a dataset.
