CV

Education University of California, Berkeley

August 2021 - Expected May 2025
B.A. in Statistics and Economics
Relevant Coursework:
- Time Series, Statistical Prediction and Machine Learning, Probability, Statistics,
- Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, Computing with Data, Multivariate Calculus, Linear Algebra
- Econometrics, Financial Economics, Corporate Finance, International Trade

London School of Economics | Berkeley Study Abroad

Research Experience
Research Assistant | University of California, Berkeley — Berkeley, CA

September 2024 - Present
- Collaborated with Afras Sial (Econ PhD candidate) to analyze the impact of earned wage access on low-income workers using IV, event study, and staggered differences-in-differences designs. Created visualizations to present findings on a data set of 1.2 million rows.
- Assisted Luisa Cefala (Haas Post-Doc) in analyzing the economic effects of “knowledge hoarding” through a field experiment across 120+ villages in Burundi.

Emory University REU | Computational Mathematics for Data Science — Atlanta, GA

May 2022 - July 2022
Mentor: Prof. Samy Wu Fung
- Built and trained implicit neural networks to denoise images with fixed memory costs and yielded comparable results to state-of-the-art models using Jacobian-free Backpropagation.
- Analyzed fast, efficient algorithms for inverse imaging problems.
- Presented research through a [website][http://www.math.emory.edu/site/cmds-reuret/projects/2022-implicit/], midterm presentation and Poster; and final [paper][https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.02065] with published Code,.

Relevant Experience
Finance & Internal Affairs Director | Associated Students of the University of California — Berkeley, CA

September 2023 - May 2024
- Manage the office’s Finance operations by allocating funds for departmental needs and operations.
- Mediated external matters between offices and the student body to address and resolve key issues.

Gamma Phi Beta Sorority | Personal and Chapter Enrichment Chairwoman - Berkeley, CA

January 2023 - December 2023
- Led monthly enrichment meetings for 60+ members, fostering personal and chapter growth.

Projects - [link to repository][https://github.com/lisazhao513/CS-STAT-Projects] Spam Email Classification

Built a logistic regression model for spam email classification.
Enhanced model accuracy with feature engineering, including tokenization and length-based features, and evaluated performance using a train-validation-test split and confusion matrix.

Simpsons Transcript Text Analysis

Built an interactive R Shiny app to analyze and visualize The Simpsons TV show transcripts, featuring season filtering, dialogue trends, and sentiment analysis across all 33 seasons.
Applied natural language processing techniques like word frequency, sentiment scoring, and topic modeling to uncover thematic trends in the series.

Predicting Housing Prices

Developed a linear regression model to predict housing prices in Cook County.
Applied data preprocessing techniques, including encoding categorical variables and feature scaling, and evaluated model performance using RMSE and cross-validation.

Technical Skils

Languages