Zirui Li, Ph.D.

Dr. Zirui Li is a postdoctoral research fellow at Fitila Labs, working on statistical learning, uncertainty quantification and numerical methods for partial differential equations.

She holds a Ph.D. in Mathematics and a B.S. in Mathematics and Applied Mathematics from Nanjing University. Her doctoral research in geometric analysis and partial differential equations was published in the Journal of Differential Equations and in Calculus of Variations and Partial Differential Equations.

She also holds an M.S. in Statistics from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (2025), where she worked with Professor Ruoqing Zhu on confidence bands for survival random forests (Biometrika) and on smoothed dimension reduction for spatial transcriptomics (Bioinformatics). She led the development of the RLT (Reinforcement Learning Trees) R package and its C++ backend.

She first worked with Fitila in 2024 as a data science intern, deriving multiphase transport equations and building custom finite-element solvers in C++ on the MFEM library.