Yolanda Chen
Studied at Fudan University
Works at ModelsLive Inc.
Available Monday at 6:30 AM UTC
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About Yolanda
I've spent the last several years on both sides of the academic gauntlet, publishing my own work, reviewing other people's, and watching what actually separates an application or a paper that gets in from one that doesn't. I hold a PhD and have gone through the postdoc and faculty job market process myself, so I'm not coaching from theory. I know what it feels like to get a rejection you don't understand, and I know how to read one and figure out what it's actually telling you. I work with students on graduate and PhD applications, personal statements, and the kind of writing that's supposed to sound confident but usually just sounds vague.
Why do I coach?
I coach because I've seen how much of this process comes down to information you're not supposed to have to guess at, what a reviewer is actually looking for, why a strong applicant still gets rejected, and what "revise and resubmit" really means. Nobody handed me a clear explanation of any of this; I had to piece it together through years of trial, error, and a lot of rejection letters. I'd rather hand someone the shortcut than watch them learn it the slow, expensive way I did.
Work Experience
Founder & CEO
ModelsLive Inc.
July 2026 - Present
Founder and CEO of an AI company developing products across professional advisory, live commerce and conversational AI. Led the company from incorporation through product development, with multiple US provisional patents filed. Day to day this means research, product decisions and everything a solo founder does. For the people I coach, the relevant part is that I work at the boundary between academic research and applied AI, which is exactly where most of them are trying to land.
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Weill Cornell Medicine
October 2025 - May 2026
Postdoctoral research in bioinformatics and AI for science at Weill Cornell Medicine and Houston Methodist Research Institute, working at the intersection of machine learning and biomedical data. This is where I learned how research careers are evaluated inside the US system: how candidates are screened, what makes a research story credible to people who read hundreds of them, and how much of an outcome depends on positioning rather than raw ability. That perspective is the core of what I bring to the people I coach.
Research Intern
Tencent
May 2024 - May 2025
AI research at Tencent on large model safety, working on safety and security for one of the most widely used communication platforms in the world.
Research Intern
ByteDance TikTok
May 2023 - May 2024
Applied research at ByteDance on multimodal large models for e-commerce, working at the scale of products serving hundreds of millions of users. Experience translating research into systems that actually ship.
Research Intern
Microsoft
July 2022 - May 2023
Research at Microsoft Research Asia, one of the leading industrial AI research labs, working on parameter efficient methods for training and adapting large models.
Yolanda was also given offers to work at
Cornell University
Washington University in St. Louis
Baidu
Huawei
Education
Fudan University
PHD, Computer Science/AI
2021 - 2025
Completed my PhD in Computer Science with a focus on AI, publishing 23 first-author papers at venues including ACL, CVPR and EMNLP during and around this period. Worked across NLP, multimodal AI, LLM agents and AI for science. Went through the full cycle of what most applicants are about to face: choosing a direction, building a research story that holds together, getting rejected, and learning what reviewers and admissions committees actually respond to. Most of what I coach comes directly from this.
Yolanda was also personally admitted to
Sun Yat-sen University
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