Matthias Schonlau's students

Research Group

Gradon Nicholls

Ph.D student, Topic: Using LLMs to catch coding mistakes. Awards: Ontario Graduate Scholarship recipient, Conference Presentation award (5th Annual Student Conference at UofW). Sep 2022-ongoing.

Tiancheng Yang

Ph.D. student. Topic: Automating the Quality Prediction of Survey Questions: Predicting Measurement Quality Directly from Natural Text. Awards: Sprott award for particular promise in research. Jan 2023-ongoing.

Sandra Huang

Co-op student/ research assistant. Undergraduate student with a Computer Science major. Topic: Improving the hammock plot for visualizing data. Sep 2025-ongoing.

Carmen Alicia Liang Zhen

Master's student (supervised jointly with Dr. Audrey Beliveau) Topic: Visualization in network meta-analysis

Alonzo Finch

Incoming Ph.D. student Topic: Visualization / explainable AI

Alumni

Ph.D. Students:

Jennifer Wong, Ph.D. (2009) Rand Graduate School. Ph.D. Dissertation in Criminology. Next position: Assistant Professor, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver. (I was the de facto advisor; formally, a well-known criminologist was named).

Hyukjun (Jay) Gweon, Sep 2013-Sep 2017. Statistical Learning Approaches to some Classification Problems. Dissertation Link. Subsequent position: Assistant Professor, University of Illionois at Urbana-Champaign. Currently: Assistant Professor, Western University.

Malte Schierholz, 2016-2019. New Methods for Job and Occupation Classification (Sociology; 2nd Advisor; jointly with Frauke Kreuter). Subsequent position: Federal Institute for Employment Research, Germany.

Zhoushanyue (Sophie) He, Jan 2016-Jan 2021. On the Automatic Coding of Text Answers to Open-ended Questions in Surveys, Dissertation Link. Subsequent position: Roche Pharmaceutical Company.

Ilia Sucholutsky, Sep 2017-June 2021, Learning from almost no data. Dissertation Link. Awards include: Concept Graduate Student Startup Fund Waterloo, AI Institute, 2021. Subsequent position: Postdoctoral Fellow, Princeton University.

Master's Students:

Yanyang Zhao, (2012), An Overview of the Sample Design in the International Tobacco Control (ITC) Project, University of Waterloo

Zhoushanyue (Sophie) He (2013), An exploration of final comments in the American Life Internet survey panel, University of Waterloo, Next position: ITC project, U of Waterloo

Yu Luo (2014), Evaluation questions as predictors of attrition in the LISS survey panel, University of Waterloo

Daniel Rodriguez (2014), A new approach for selecting training data for the classification of text data, University of Waterloo, Next position: Ottawa Research hospital, then Ph.D. student

Cynthia McLauchlan (2015), Are Final Comments in Web Survey Panels Associated with Next-Wave Attrition?, University of Waterloo

Yilun Zhang (2017), Sentiment Analysis of Final Comments in the LISS Panel, University of Waterloo

Alice Hing-Yee Leung (2021), Predicting Next-Wave Attrition in Web Survey Panels by Applying Machine Learning Methods on Final Comments. University of Waterloo, Next position: LinkedIn

Tiancheng Yang (2022), exKidneyBERT: A Language Model for Kidney Transplant Pathology Reports and the Crucial Role of Extended Vocabularies. University of Waterloo, Dissertation Link, Next position: Ph.D student.

Undergraduate Students with Thesis:

Cynthia McLauchlan (Knowledge Integration) (2014), Does taking a statistics course improve statistical literacy?, University of Waterloo

Full Time Research Assistants/ Co-op Students:

Joey Zhang, Winter 2014, Developing Coding infrastructure for Text mining

Nick Guenther, Spring 2015, Exploring the use of Support vector Machines in the social sciences

Dora (Xinyue) Liu, Jan-June 2017, Respondent driven sampling for estimating Bitcoin usage (jointly with the Bank of Canada)

Rosie (Yuyan) Zou, Spring 2017, Random forests and their implementation