· Record

Every award, with its year and its source

A short certificate of who I am, then the register: research, olympiads, debate and writing, ventures and hackathons, each with its year and where it came from.

Certified · who this is

Liqian (Eric) Yan

A student in Shanghai, co-first author of the language paper and first author of the economics paper, both published here in full.

School
Shanghai Starriver Bilingual School
Class of
2028
Languages
Chinese and English
Cities
Shanghai and New York

The register

Research

Regeneron International Science & Engineering Fair. Finalist, for the AIFE Engine. The paper is on this site. May 2026 · read →
S.T. Yau Science Award, Tsinghua. Gold for original research in economic and financial modelling. November 2025

Olympiads

International Economics Olympiad. Gold, placing ninth in the world on an individual score of 176.76. July 2026
IEO Business Case. Silver, second in the world, as captain of Team China-1. The captain writes the preparation plan and decides who takes which analysis. July 2026
British Physics Olympiad. Top Gold, sat in Grade 9, two years early. The modelling habit started with physics. 2024

Debate and writing

Oxford World Schools Debate. Runner-up in the Open division. 2024
Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. Three Gold Keys for creative writing. 2022 to 2023

Ventures

Hackathons

Beyond the table

Both papers began outside school and stayed there: each is my own question, followed for as long as it took.

The treasury job is the one that changed how I work. Allocating a school budget means declining requests in writing, with a reason people can check, which turns out to be most of running a nonprofit's finances.

Toolbox

Modelling
Deep learning and statistical modelling, in Python
Systems
Full-stack development, retrieval-augmented generation and signal processing
Economics
Econometrics, causal inference and computational social science

Argument is a technical skill

Debate taught me to find the weakest joint in my own case before someone else does. It is why the research pages here state each result's limits next to the result. A reviewer finds the gaps anyway; better they come from me.

The reading habit is less disciplined and probably more useful: world literature, philosophy and theology, mostly outside anything I am formally studying. CNM-BERT exists because I found it strange that a model could read a million Chinese sentences and still be blind to how a character is put together. I got there from the reading side of the desk, which is probably why it looked strange to me rather than routine.

Away from the desk

Rowing
Historical European martial arts
LEGO design
World literature, philosophy and theology
Politics