Minji Kim

Hi, I'm Minji Kim!

I am pursuing a Ph.D. in Statistics and Operations Research at UNC Chapel Hill under the guidance of Prof. Vladas Pipiras.
My expertise lies in (1) statistical methodologies and (2) physical AI in modeling physical phenomena. My doctoral research is motivated by computer codes for naval ship motion predictions, focusing on challenges like extreme ship motion behaviors.

(1) How to utilize data efficiently when multiple simulation codes are available? Addressed the distribution estimation of limited high-fidelity outputs by leveraging (lower-cost) surrogate model outputs through (i) nonparametric kernel density estimation with importance sampling and (ii) a parametric ensemble estimator approach, both with particular emphasis on extreme behaviors.
(2) Spatio-temporal modeling in latent space: Physical AI research in physics-informed reduced-order modeling for approximating (spatio-temporal) PDE solutions. Latent state dynamics were modeled with Neural ODEs. Used coordinate-based NNs to encode/decode the space and apply insights from 3D graphics to impose boundary conditions.

Applied these skills during internships at LLNL (2022) and Moloco (2023), addressing highly quantitative challenges in real-time digital ad bidding at Moloco and data-driven physics simulations at a national research lab.

More details are in the Research tab or my Resume.

Ph.D: Statistics and Operations Research (STOR), UNC Chapel Hill, May 2026 (expected)
M.S: Statistics, Seoul National University, Feb 2021
B.S: Statistics, Minor in Computer Science and Engineering, Seoul National University, Feb 2019