Yue Sun is a first year PhD student in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Washington, Seattle, where he is advised by Maryam Fazel. He holds a Bachelors of Engineering from the Department of Electronics Engineering at Tsinghua University. He is interested in statistical machine learning, optimization and signal processing. Currently, he is working on first order algorithms for non-convex optimization problems. During the third year of his undergraduate studies, he visited Ohio State University, working under Yuejie Chi on phase retrieval and low-rank matrix completion problems.