Two Penn fourth-years awarded 2023 Churchill Scholarships
Ryan Jeong and Arnav Lal are in the College of Arts and Sciences.
College of Arts and Sciences fourth-years Ryan Jeong (left) and Arnav Lal are among 16 students selected nationwide to receive a Churchill Scholarship for a year of graduate research study at the University of Cambridge in England.
Lal, from Greer, South Carolina, and Jeong, from College Station, Texas, are among 16 students selected nationwide who will receive full funding for a one-year master’s degree at Churchill College at Cambridge.
The scholarship is considered one of the most prestigious and competitive international fellowships available to American students planning graduate study in the United Kingdom. Churchill Scholars are chosen from select universities nationwide in the disciplines of science, mathematics, and engineering.
Penn has had 14 Churchill Scholars since the program’s inception in 1963. This is the second year Penn has had two affiliates receive the award in the same year; the other was 2021.
Jeong is majoring in mathematics and minoring in statistics and data science in the College of Arts and Sciences and is submatriculating for a master’s degree in mathematics in the School of Arts & Sciences. He has taken many graduate-level courses in mathematics, statistics, and theoretical computer science.
Jeong is broadly interested in problems at the intersection of mathematics and its cognate disciplines. His work in theoretical deep learning, which studied how curve length changes in expectation when composed with ReLU neural networks at initialization, resulted in a paper published at the 2022 International Conference on Learning Representations. He has also participated in mathematics Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REUs) funded by the National Science Foundation at Brown University, Williams College, and the University of Minnesota, Duluth. He is currently thinking about related problems in theoretical deep learning supervised by professors at Princeton and McGill universities and is continuing work on problems from his REUs. He is also working on problems related to deletion channels and trace reconstruction initiated with Robin Pemantle, Penn’s Merriam Term Professor of Mathematics. His research in graph theory, combinatorics, and probability resulted in five papers which have been submitted for publication in professional mathematics journals. Jeong was awarded Penn’s 2022-23 Richard Garfield Scholarship and the 2022 Undergraduate Math Research Prize.
At Cambridge, Jeong plans to pursue a master’s degree in mathematical statistics.
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