Summary
Minjie Fan is a Staff Software Engineer with 11 years of experience applying statistics and machine learning to high-impact problems across advertising, biology, medicine, physics, and geophysics. She has led technical teams at Google and Meta/Instagram, driving deep learning models and user embeddings that contributed to over $1B in annual Shopping ads revenue. With a PhD in Statistics from UC Davis and a strong publication record (including Nature Communications and Science Advances), she uniquely bridges rigorous research and production-grade ML. At Google Accelerated Science she translated statistical methods into real-world scientific discoveries, authoring eight peer-reviewed papers. Currently she focuses on early-stage ranking and recommendation at Instagram, combining causal thinking and representation learning to improve feed relevance. Colleagues describe her as a research-minded engineer who turns complex scientific insights into scalable product impact.
11 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Statistics, 4.0, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Statistics, 4.0 at University of California, Davis
Minor, Economics, 3.52, Minor, Economics, 3.52 at Fudan University
Experimental accelerated science program, Experimental accelerated science program at High School Affiliated to Fudan University
English, Chinese