Jian Ding is an associate professor in the statistics department at the University of Pennsylvania. His research area is probability theory with a focus on interactions with statistical physics and theory of computer science. In particular, his recent research topics include random constraint satisfaction problems, random planar geometry, Anderson localization, and disordered spin models. Ding obtained his PhD from UC Berkeley in 2011. He was a Szegö Assistant Professor at Stanford in 2011-2012, and also a MSRI postdoc fellow in Spring 2012. Jian was a faculty member in the statistics department at University of Chicago in 2012-2017 before joining the University of Pennsylvania.