His research interests lie in computational optimization and its applications in image processing, machine learning, and other data-science problems. He received his B.S. and M.S in mathematics from University of Science and Technology of China in 2005 and 2008, respectively, and then Ph.D. in mathematics from University of California, Los Angeles in 2012. After completing his PhD, Ming Yan was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Computational and Applied Mathematics at Rice University from July 2012 to June 2013, and then moved to University of California, Los Angeles as a Postdoctoral Scholar and an Assistant Adjunct Professor from July 2013 to June 2015..