Academic Outreach

Partnering with talented professors and doctoral students is crucial to our mission of finding value in the world’s data, and an important way of giving back to the broader research community.

We love tackling hard problems in a wide range of technical fields, even challenges that are not directly tied to our day-to-day work.

That’s why we actively engage with the brightest minds and best ideas—wherever they’re found.

Two Sigma’s culture of learning has its roots in our employees’ deep ties to academia.

200+

PhDs

700+

Employees with advanced degrees

15+

International Math Olympiad medalists

5+

Physics Olympiad medalists

Two Sigma Academic Partnerships

Our partnerships with universities, research labs, professors, and students take many forms, including:

PhD Fellowships

Direct funding for research

Partnerships between faculty members and Two Sigma researchers

Consulting opportunities for professors

Data sharing

Supporting and presenting research at conferences

Undergraduate scholarships

College Mentor Connect

PhD Fellowships

Two Sigma is excited to offer PhD fellowship programs supporting doctoral students who are expanding frontiers in a STEM field such as statistics, applied mathematics, computer science, physics, and finance/econometrics.

Applications are assessed based on students’ research proposals, publications, and letters of recommendation from professors.

Please note: eligible candidates

  • Must be full-time PhD students currently pursuing a doctorate at an accredited U.S. university
  • Must be in at least their third year of a PhD program when the fellowship begins (fall semester or quarter)
  • May not currently be a Two Sigma employee or related to one
  • May not currently receive support through another, similar industry fellowship award

Applications are now closed for the 2022 PhD Fellowships and 2022 Undergraduate scholarships – Winners will be announced early March 2022.

2022 Fellowship Award Recipients

To see a full list of runners up and past recipients, click here.

Haixiang Zhang

PhD Fellowship

Applied Mathematics
University of California, Berkeley

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Xinyi (Tracey) Zhong

PhD Fellowship - 2nd Place Runner Up

Statistics
Yale University

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Saachi Jain

Diversity PhD Fellowship

Computer Science
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

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Lucio Dery

Diversity PhD Fellowship - 2nd Place Runner Up

Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University

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Two Sigma UC Berkeley Statistics PhD Fellowship

Alice Cima

Statistics
University of California, Berkeley

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Two Sigma Undergraduate Scholarships

Two Sigma is excited to offer an Undergraduate Scholarship and Undergraduate Diversity Scholarship to support undergraduate students who are expanding frontiers in a STEM field such as statistics, applied mathematics, computer science, and physics.

Additionally, we have partnered with Howard University to establish an scholarship for undergraduate students studying within their Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. This scholarship supports Howard University students who are members of historically underrepresented groups.

Applications are assessed based on students’ resumes, degree transcripts, and letters of recommendation from professors.

Please note eligible candidates:

  • Must be full-time students currently pursuing an undergraduate degree at an accredited university in the United States
  • Must be in their third or fourth year of a 4-year undergraduate degree program when the scholarship begins (fall semester or quarter)
  • May not currently be a Two Sigma employee or related to one

Applications are now closed for the 2022 Undergraduate Scholarship and 2022 Undergraduate Diversity Scholarship. 

Undergraduate Scholarship Recipients

Congratulations to our 2022 winner:

Fira Fatmasiefa

Undergraduate Diversity Scholarship
Astrophysics
University of California Berkeley

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Collaboration plays an essential role in the advancement of scientific knowledge. That’s why we eagerly cultivate long-term partnerships with faculty at prestigious academic institutions.

We are always looking for ways to team up with top research labs, research consortiums, and affiliate programs.

Apply research

The opportunity to apply research to real-world problems

The research Two Sigma does typically isn’t theoretical in nature. It’s focused on producing concrete results that benefit real people.

Access to data

Two Sigma loves data, and has a lot of it

In the past, we’ve shared interesting datasets with researchers at Carnegie Mellon’s Parallel Data Lab, Columbia Data Science Institute, and Mass Open Cloud, for example.

Relationship-building

Faculty partnerships can lead to opportunities to work with Two Sigma

Faculty partnerships, such as Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR) and Cornell Tech can lead to opportunities to work with Two Sigma as a consultant, to host Two Sigma researchers at guest lectures, and more.

Two Sigma has partnered with professors in the following research areas, either as Faculty Research Award recipients or consultants.

Computer Vision

• Serge Belongie

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Data Science

• Jianqing Fan
• Madeleine Udell
• Art Owen

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Finance/Econometrics

• Michael Riordan

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Machine Learning

• Daniel Hsu
• Aleksander Mądry
• David M. Blei
• Stefanie Jegelka
• John Cunningham
• Justin Sirignano
• Tengyu Ma

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Physics/Astrophysics


• Joshua Bloom

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Statistics

• Emmanuel Candes
• Jonathan Taylor
• Jun Liu
• Jiashun Jin

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The Two Sigma Diversity Faculty Research Award

We are proud to offer an annual award to tenured and tenure-track faculty at U.S. colleges and universities who have made an outstanding impact in STEM research, teaching, mentoring, and/or outreach advancing diversity. Learn more

Richard Tapia

2021 Two Sigma Diversity Faculty Research Award Recipient, Rice University

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Ayanna Howard

2022 Two Sigma Diversity Faculty Research Award Recipient, Ohio State University

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Richard Tapia

2021 Two Sigma Diversity Faculty Research Award Recipient, Rice University

Professor Tapia was born in Los Angeles to parents who emigrated from Mexico when they were children, seeking educational opportunities.

He was the first in his family to attend college, earning his BA, MA, and PhD degrees in mathematics from the University of California, Los Angeles. Due to his efforts, Rice University has received national recognition for its educational outreach programs, and the Rice Computational and Applied Mathematics Department has become a national leader in supporting women and underrepresented minority PhDs in the mathematical sciences. Read more about Professor Tapia

Ayanna Howard

2022 Two Sigma Diversity Faculty Research Award Recipient, Ohio State University

Dr. Ayanna Howard is the Dean of Engineering at The Ohio State University and Monte Ahuja Endowed Dean’s Chair. Previously she was the Linda J. and Mark C. Smith Endowed Chair in Bioengineering and Chair of the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Dr. Howard’s research encompasses advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), assistive technologies, and robotics, and has resulted in over 275 peer-reviewed publications. She currently works on projects ranging from healthcare robots to developing methods to mitigate bias and trust in AI. She is a Fellow of IEEE, AAAI, AAAS, and the National Academy of Inventors (NAI). She was also recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. To date, Dr. Howard’s unique accomplishments have been highlighted through a number of other public recognitions, including being recognized as one of the 23 most powerful women engineers in the world by Business Insider and one of the Top 50 U.S. Women in Tech by Forbes. In 2013, she also founded Zyrobotics, which developed STEM educational products to engage children of diverse abilities.

Prior to Georgia Tech, Dr. Howard was at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory where she held the title of Senior Robotics Researcher and Deputy Manager in the Office of the Chief Scientist. She also served on the National Academies’ Committee on Responsible Computing Research: Ethics and Governance of Computing Research and its Applications and currently serves on the National Artificial Intelligence Advisory Committee (NAIAC) and on the standing committee of the One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence (AI100). Read more about Dean Ayanna Howard

We push the boundaries of knowledge in computer science, statistics, and finance.

We constantly draw ideas and inspiration from the broader math, science, and investment communities. Collaborating with our academic partners through technical publications and presentations is just one way of giving back. To see more, visit research.twosigma.com.

Engineering

Sundial: Harmonizing Concurrency Control and Caching in a Distributed OLTP Database Management System

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Data Science

TRIEST: Counting Local and Global Triangles in Fully-Dynamic Streams with Fixed Memory Size

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Data Science

MiSoSouP: Mining Interesting Subgroups with Sampling and Pseudodimension

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We are excited to announce the Two Sigma Diversity Faculty Research Award

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