I am Gulzina (aka Julia or stat_cat), originally from Kyrgyzstan. In 2012, I moved to Ankara, Turkey, to study Mathematics at Middle East Technical University. After completing my undergraduate, I came to the US in 2016. Before joining grad school, I spent one year at UC Davis, Data Science Initiative. In summer 2019 I defended MS thesis on Gaussian processes in machine learning under the supervison of Prof. Jarad Niemi and got my MS in Statistics at Iowa State University.

Currently, I'm a PhD student in Statistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz where I was awarded the prestigious Chancellor's Fellowship for outstanding PhD researchers. I am interested in Computational statistics, primarily on applications of Bayesian statistics in ML/AI.