Sitan Chen

Timeline

1. 2000s

   From Hefei to Georgia

   Born in Hefei, China, he moves with his family to Canada when he is one year old. They move to Suwanee, Georgia, in the early 2000s.

2. 2016

   Harvard thesis prizes

   At Harvard, he studies mathematics and computer science, then graduates summa cum laude in 2016. His thesis on geometric aspects of counting and arithmetic complexity earns the Thomas T. Hoopes and Captain Jonathan Fay Prizes.

3. 2016

   Doctoral work at MIT

   Starting in 2016, he works at MIT with PhD advisor Ankur Moitra on algorithms for machine learning and inference.

4. 2020

   Learning from untrusted batches

   In 2020, he coauthors “Learning Structured Distributions From Untrusted Batches: Faster and Simpler” with Jerry Li and Ankur Moitra. Their method uses distribution structure to achieve sublinear sample complexity in polynomial time.

5. October 2021

   Berkeley postdoc and Harvard offer

   He completes a PhD in EECS at MIT in 2021. In October 2021, he is an NSF postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley and a Research Fellow at the Simons Institute, while Harvard announces he will join SEAS as an assistant professor of computer science.

6. 2025

   An ICML Outstanding Paper

   At ICML 2025, he coauthors “Train for the Worst, Plan for the Best: Understanding Token Ordering in Masked Diffusions” with Jaeyeon Kim, Kulin Shah, Vasilis Kontonis, and Sham Kakade; the paper wins an Outstanding Paper Award. Its adaptive token-ordering method raises Sudoku-solving accuracy in pretrained masked diffusion models from under 7% to about 90%.

7. July 2026

   Kempner associate faculty

   In July 2026, he begins a three-year appointment as an associate faculty member at Harvard's Kempner Institute.

8. As of October 2026

   Assistant professor at Harvard

   He is an assistant professor of computer science at Harvard SEAS. His research includes diffusion-based generative modeling and theory for learning in quantum systems.