Chenkai Yu

Chenkai Yu is a PhD candidate in the Decision, Risk, and Operations (DRO) division at Columbia Business School, advised by Hongyao Ma. His research focuses on designing uncertainty-aware systems with strategic participants. He bridges the gap between optimization, market/mechanism design, and statistical inference to develop algorithms with provable guarantees and practical impact. His work spans three main areas: network pricing in ridesharing platforms, fraud detection in two-sided markets, and the foundations of online learning and control under uncertainty. 

He earned his Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from the Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences (Yao Class) at Tsinghua University. During his undergraduate studies, he conducted research at Caltech with Adam Wierman and at the University of Michigan with Grant Schoenebeck.