Hi! I’m Senem Işık, a PhD student at Stanford University advised by Amin Saberi.
I am broadly interested in the foundations of learning and decision-making systems, often motivated by social and economic contexts. At Stanford, I have been affiliated with the Operations Research group in MS&E, CS Theory and the Machine Learning Group, the SOAL (Society & Algorithms) Lab, the Language Data and Reasoning Lab, and the Center for Computational Market Design. As of June 2026, I have been working as an Applied Scientist Intern at Amazon Science, hosted by Nina Mishra.
Previously, I completed my Bachelor’s with Honors in Mathematics and Master’s in Computer Science also at Stanford :) where I was advised by Tselil Schramm and Jinyoung Park. I am originally from Istanbul, Türkiye. I pronounce my full name as Senæm ɯˈʃɯk, and here are three places that are close to my heart.
I am really excited to be a course assistant for Stanford MS&E 319: Efficient Generative Language Models this fall. Come join our discussions!
ResearchThe Stanford Market Design in the Age of AI Conference (2026)
SIGMETRICS Workshop on Learning-augmented Algorithms: Theory and Applications (LATA’26)
TTIC Learning-driven Algorithms and Machine-aided Proofs (LAMP’26) Best Poster Award
Preprint forthcoming
Work done while interning at Amazon Science
Preprint forthcoming
Working paper
Preprint forthcoming
Preliminary version at a workshop in the 25th ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC’24)
In submission to the Advances in Applied Probability Journal
Presentation at Joint Mathematics Meetings (JMM’25)
Major revision at the Combinatorics, Probability and Computing Journal
Presentations at Stanford Computer Science Research (CURIS’21)
The antidote allocation poster received the Outstanding Poster Award
ExperienceApplied Scientist
GraphRAG
Host: Nina Mishra
Quantitative Trader
Auctions on single stock options
Software Engineer
Stream processing
Undergraduate Researcher
Non-adaptive local computation algorithms
Supervisor: Madhu Sudan
Undergraduate Researcher
Lipschitz functions on expanders
Supervisor: Jinyoung Park
Undergraduate Researcher
Active learning for geospatial data
Supervisor: Andrew Ng
CURIS Fellow
Randomized graph algorithms to combat epidemics
Supervisor: Mary Wootters
Teaching & ServiceTaught by Amin Karbasi, Anay Mehrotra, Amin Saberi, and Grigoris Velegkas
Taught by Aviad Rubinstein
Taught by Amin Saberi
Taught by Aviad Rubinstein
Taught by Jelani Nelson
Reviewer: Theoretical Computer Science Journal
ExpositoryHonors thesis (Stanford Department of Mathematics) advised by Tselil Schramm.
Blog post published as part of Stanford course CS224W (Machine Learning with Graphs) by Jure Leskovec.
Tutorial submitted as part of Stanford course EE 364B (Convex Optimization II) by Mert Pilanci.