Prior to joining Columbia in 2021, Professor Gu spent a year (2020-2021) as a postdoctoral researcher at Duke University, mentored by Prof. David B. Dunson. In 2020, she received a Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of Michigan, advised by Prof. Gongjun Xu. In 2015, Gu received a B.S. in Mathematics from Tsinghua University.

Professor Gu is broadly interested in latent variable models, including their variants in statistical machine learning and their applications in education, psychology, and other social and behavioral sciences. Her specific research interests cover the methods and theory of multidimensional discrete latent structure, probabilistic graphical models, multivariate categorical data, psychometrics, tensor decompositions, Bayesian statistics, and deep generative models.