Kai Li

Kai Li

Researcher and educator working in statistics, reinforcement learning, modeling, and simulation.

Teaching & Mentoring

Teaching is an important part of my academic life. I enjoy helping students move between mathematical ideas, computation, and interpretation—especially when a difficult concept begins to feel usable rather than merely abstract.

Graduate instructor

Across these five undergraduate sections, I taught 240 students.

Teaching assistant

Across these four graduate sections, I supported 80 students.

Teaching approach

I aim to make rigorous material approachable without flattening it. In statistics courses, that means helping students understand not only how to obtain an answer, but also why a method is appropriate, which assumptions matter, how computation supports the analysis, and how to communicate a conclusion responsibly.

Research mentoring

In summer 2026, I served as a graduate student research mentor in the Simons Summer Research Program at Stony Brook University. I supervised Jack Lu’s project, Independent Spatial and Temporal Evidence for Temperature-Mediated Marine Range Shifts, and provided guidance on study design, statistical modeling, robustness checks, interpretation, scientific writing, visualization, and poster preparation.

This work belongs here as a mentoring experience rather than as one of my GitHub repositories. The final poster was authored by Jack Lu, Kai Li, and Wei Zhu.

Teaching recognition

  • Teachers Rated Excellent Educators by their Students (TREES), two-time recipient, for the 2022–2023 and 2023–2024 academic years
  • Excellence in Student Teaching, 2023 and 2025
  • Outstanding Student Teacher, 2024

Selected public course materials

These materials document past offerings. Current students should use the official course platform for current schedules, office hours, assignments, and announcements.