PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Kyra Gan

Also known as Jingyi Gan

Kyra Gan is an operations researcher whose AI work connects causal discovery with reinforcement learning. She completed her first year of college at UC San Diego in 2014, earned mathematics and economics degrees at Smith College in 2017, received a Tata Consultancy Services Fellowship in 2020, and completed an operations research Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon in 2022. Her active sequential hypothesis-testing work won the 2021 INFORMS Pierskalla Best Paper Award; in 2025 she coauthored LoSAM, and in 2026 she coauthored a finite-horizon reinforcement-learning paper. Since 2023, she is an assistant professor of Operations Research and Information Engineering at Cornell Tech, where an August 2026 Cornell CAT award supports her Néa Fertility project on IVF stimulation protocol optimization.

Works
43
Citations
72
h-index
4

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 27 October 2026.

Timeline

  1. 2014–2017

    UC San Diego to Smith

    She completes her first year of college at UCSD in June 2014 and earns bachelor's degrees in mathematics and economics at Smith College in 2017.

  2. 2020

    Tata Consultancy Services Fellowship

    At Carnegie Mellon, she receives the Tata Consultancy Services Fellowship in 2020 while pursuing a Ph.D. in operations research.

  3. 2021

    A Pierskalla paper award

    She wins the 2021 INFORMS Pierskalla Best Paper Award with Su Jia, Andrew Li, and Sridhar Tayur for “Toward a Liquid Biopsy: Greedy Approximation Algorithms for Active Sequential Hypothesis Testing.”

  4. 2022

    A Carnegie Mellon PhD

    In 2022, she completes a Ph.D. in Operations Research at Carnegie Mellon's Tepper School of Business. Before joining Cornell Tech, she works as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard's Statistical Reinforcement Lab.

  5. 2025

    LoSAM and causal discovery

    In 2025, she coauthors LoSAM with Sujai Hiremath and Promit Ghosal, a UAI paper on global causal discovery in additive-noise models with mixed mechanisms and general noise.

  6. 2026

    A finite-horizon RL algorithm

    With Jiamin Xu, she coauthors “Fast Non-Episodic Finite-Horizon RL with K-Step Lookahead Thresholding” in 2026. The paper selects actions when an estimated K-step lookahead value exceeds a time-varying threshold.

  7. Since 2023

    Assistant professor at Cornell Tech

    In 2023, she joins Cornell Tech as an assistant professor of Operations Research and Information Engineering. In October 2026, she is an assistant professor there. An August 2026 Cornell Center for Advanced Technology award supports her project with Néa Fertility on dynamic ovarian response modeling for IVF stimulation protocol optimization.

Career

  1. Since 2023Cornell UniversityAssistant Professor of Operations Research and Information Engineering
  2. Harvard UniversityPostdoctoral fellow

Education

  1. 2022Carnegie Mellon UniversityPhD
  2. 2017Smith CollegeBachelor's degrees in mathematics and economics
  3. 2014University of California, San DiegoStudent

From the biography.

Colleagues

People with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Kyra Gan yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Seminar @ Cornell Tech: Kyra Gan tech.cornell.edu. Checked 26 October 2026.
  2. Doctoral Students Honored for Research Contributions cmu.edu. Checked 26 October 2026.
  3. Kyra Gan's Personal Website kyra-gan.github.io. Checked 26 October 2026.
  4. Pierskalla Award - Health Applications Society connect.informs.org. Checked 26 October 2026.
  5. Cornell Tech Welcomes Six New Faculty Members in 2023-24 Academic Year tech.cornell.edu. Checked 26 October 2026.
  6. Job Market and Placements | Tepper School of Business cmu.edu. Checked 26 October 2026.
  7. Research by Area — Kyra Gan kyra-gan.github.io. Checked 26 October 2026.
  8. Fast Non-Episodic Finite-Horizon RL with K-Step Lookahead Thresholding arxiv.org. Checked 26 October 2026.
  9. Cornell CAT awards support seven new biotechnology partnerships | Cornell Chronicle news.cornell.edu. Checked 26 October 2026.