We are excited to profile our CIRES graduate, Dr Hechuan Wen, who celebrated his PhD graduation last week at The University of Queensland’s graduation ceremony in Shanghai.
How can organisations make informed decisions when the data available are limited, changing, or incomplete?
This question became the focus of CIRES PhD graduate Dr Hechuan Wen’s thesis, Advancing Causal Effect Estimation: From Training Data Expansion to Estimator Design, supervised by Associate Professor Rocky Chen, Professor Hongzhi Yin, Dr Li Kheng Chai, and Professor Shazia Sadiq.
Rather than simply predicting what is likely to happen, Hechuan studied how AI can estimate what would happen to an individual or community under a particular intervention, such as a healthcare policy, treatment, or public service. His research focused on making causal effect estimation more reliable and practical when real-world data are imperfect. Specifically, he addressed three key challenges: identifying the most informative data when labelling resources are limited; maintaining reliable estimates when data distributions change or important variables become unavailable; and quantifying uncertainty when causal effects are estimated from complex, interconnected data.
Reflecting on the importance of building connections throughout his PhD journey, Hechuan offers the following advice to current and future research students:
“My advice would be to stay focused on a meaningful research problem but remain open to where the PhD journey may take you. Research rarely progresses exactly as planned, and some of the most important learning happens when methods fail, data are imperfect, or questions need to evolve. I would also encourage students to look beyond publications and technical performance. Working with partner organisations, domain experts, and researchers from different backgrounds can broaden your perspective, strengthen the relevance of your research, and open opportunities that extend well beyond the PhD.”
Pictured above: Dr Hechuan Wen, UQ Graduation Day in Shanghai, October 2026.
We are excited to profile our first CIRES graduate, Dr 
Our Centre Director Professor Shazia Sadiq FSTE is this week’s FellowFriday! Thank you ATSE for profiling Shazia and her amazing work and leadership in data science, AI and responsible data management.
A Professor at The University of Queensland, Professor Sadiq’s research focuses on helping organisations build and protect agile, ethical and resilient data systems for advanced analytics and AI. Her work also addresses the socio-technical barriers that shape successful data-driven transformation. She is Director of the ARC Training Centre for Information Resilience (CIRES) and has been a passionate advocate for ethical educational technology for over two decades.