Josiah (Jojo) Wallis

Biography

Josiah (Jojo) Wallis is a third year PhD student in the Department of Statistics at Penn State advised by Bing Li. He received his B.S. in Mathematics from the University of California, Riverside in 2022.

Jojo's research focuses on the intersection of representation learning, dimension reduction, and variational methods. In particular, he leverages machine and deep learning models to produce low-dimensional representations of data that are approximately sufficient for prediction. Additionally, Jojo's developing interests in statistics and data science pedagogy center on curriculum development for upper-level undergraduate courses in machine learning. These interests broadly touch on defining appropriate prerequisites, topic coverage, and assessment methods for such courses.

Prior to joining Penn State in 2024, Jojo...

Teaching

STAT 100 - Statistical Concepts and Reasoning (Summer 2025)

STAT 250 - Introduction to Biostatistics (Summer 2026)

STAT 319 - Elementary Mathematical Statistics (Fall 2025)