Lu Changjie: A Dream Chaser Who Gets Two Offers Going from a Bachelor’s to a Ph.D. Program with Full Scholarship

Lu Changjie, a senior student from the College of Science, Mathematics and Technology of WKU, is the first Mathematics student to get offers that allow him to pursue a Ph.D. with full scholarship with only a bachelor’s degree. He has the opportunity to continue his study in Bioengineering (Biomedical Imaging Analysis) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), and another offer is the Joint CMU-Pitt Ph.D. Program in Computational Biology. Out of his obsession with research work, he has completed seven research projects and published four papers, enabling his dreams to become a reality.

Graduate of 2023: Lu Changjie

Major: Mathematical Sciences (Data Analytics Option)

Graduate School: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Origin: Jiangsu Province

The Path Leading an Undergraduate Directly to a Doctoral Program

This year, the Joint CMU-Pitt Ph.D. Program in Computational Biology was made accessible to only 2 candidates, with an admission rate of no more than 3%. As Lu Changjie could remember, the interview did not only focus on the algorithms in the field but also on the underlying logic and general algorithms. Candidates were placed under high pressure of questioning from time to time, so as to test whether the applicant had a solid academic base and the potential to do research.

Lu even prepared over 40 pages of slides to present two of its dissertations as the first author within an hour. What most impressed the interviewers was his confidence and down-to-earth attitude. His answers were so fluent when asked about scientific research and basic knowledge.

During the past four years, he has published four papers and developed his capacity for scientific research. Since his junior year, he has been engaged in independent research, especially on domain adaptation. He enhanced the performance of unsupervised domain adaptation tasks by providing mathematical proofs and designing code for mutual information estimation. In January last year, he published his findings at the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), one of the most influential conferences in its field. After several months, he extended the research to domain distance measurement and presented what he found at the Asian Conference on Machine Learning (ACML). These findings make him a sought-after candidate for two direct Ph.D. programs from prestigious universities.

Academic Research and Schoolwork Enabling Fast Growth

The past four years at WKU will always be an unforgettable memory for Lu Changjie. He said, “What changes me the most is that I improve my self-learning ability and powers of concentration.” American-style education at WKU provides students with more freedom to explore and independently learn new knowledge. By trial and error, Lu is not afraid of any failure in doing research.

For him, research work and schoolwork are not trade-offs, but rather complementary to each other. Faced with challenges in academic research, Lu learned the mathematical knowledge taught in the third or fourth year beforehand in his sophomore year. The methods and deductions that are often used in his scientific research originated from classroom learning.

As Lu shared with junior students at WKU, when it comes to the balance between classroom study and scientific research, it is more important to find out their individual development plans. For students majoring in science and engineering, research capacity and GPA are equally important, and the knowledge acquired in the former can benefit the latter a lot.

To Be the Shining Star on the Way Towards Brilliance

At 11:00 and 23:00 every day, Lu Changjie regularly communicates remotely with Zheng Shen about his research progress. This is the third year of their partnership. They only have two or three hours for online talks every day due to jet lag, but these two great partners make the most of the time and exchange their views concerning mathematical methods, research ideas and code writing.

In his sophomore year, Lu was introduced to the team of Zheng Shen, a senior in Mathematical Sciences from Class 2022, marking the start of his research journey. Lu is extremely grateful to all the seniors for their guidance, “I can often receive help from the seniors. They teach me how to make deductions and share with me course links for deeper learning. This is a good tradition in our department. The great learning atmosphere and research lessons taught by our seniors benefit me a lot.”

Lu has been chasing a brighter future and he can always provide others with powerful energy and warmth. In February last year, Lu Changjie, Lu Yining, Wang Liwei and Zheng Shen jointly established the AI Lab, an initiative that focuses on naturing WKU students in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Computer Vision (CV), Deep Machine learning (ML), and Natural Language Processing (NLP). The AI Lab also encourages students to go deeper into cutting-edge research.

Lu Changjie has a clear vision of what he would like to achieve. He will continue to create a brilliant future in his favorite medical imaging analysis. It is believed that he will embrace more possibilities of life as he goes to UIUC for further study.