Cornell Tech alumna Donghui Li is applying data science to some of TikTok's central growth questions, including how users discover the app and how their engagement changes over time.
Li, who earned a master's degree from Cornell Tech in 2024, works as a senior data scientist at TikTok's office in San Jose, California. She develops attribution and growth-measurement systems used to interpret activity across the platform's global audience.
Her work examines which marketing channels drive engagement, what prompts people to join and how those users interact with the service over time. The findings are intended to help teams across the company interpret growth signals.
Li said meaningful analysis requires more than reading a metric in isolation because each figure reflects different user needs, product settings and measurement challenges.
“A metric is never just a number,” Li said. “Behind it are diverse user needs, product contexts, and measurement challenges.”
She said understanding a result requires both its statistical signal and the product and market conditions behind it.
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