Background
I am a tenured faculty member with joint primary appointments in the Department of Biostatistics & Bioinformatics and the Department of Computer Science at Duke University. I was an assistant professor of statistics at UW-Madison before joining Duke. I received my PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 2015 (advised by T. Tony Cai) and my bachelor's degree in mathematics from Peking University in 2010.
I serve as:
- Associate Chair for Research in the Department of Biostatistics & Bioinformatics at Duke;
- Associate Editor for The Annals of Statistics;
- Associate Editor for Journal of the American Statistical Association (Applications & Case Studies);
- Associate Editor for Journal of the American Statistical Association (Theory & Methods);
- Associate Editor for Statistica Sinica;
- Associate Editor for Statistics and Its Interface;
- Associate Editor for ASA Discoveries;
- Associate Editor for Statistical Learning and Data Science;
I won the Leo Breiman Junior Award (2026), COPSS Emerging Leader Award (2024), IMS Tweedie Award (2022), as featured here in IMS News, the ASA Gottfried E. Noether Junior Award (2021), as featured here, the NSF CAREER Award (2020), and the AMIA Data Science Outstanding Paper Award (2023) (News). At Duke, I have been recognized as the Eugene Anson Stead, Jr. M.D. Associate Professor and received a Teaching Excellence Recognition.
Some keywords of my research: generative AI, tensor learning, electronic health records, healthcare, microbiome studies, high-dimensional statistics, ... You can find a list of our group's publications from the tab above, on arXiv, or on Google Scholar.
For prospective PhD students: Please apply to the PhD programs in Biostatistics & Bioinformatics, Computer Science, Electrical & Computer Engineering, or CBB Program. Prospective PhD students interested in working with me can mention this on their applications. Applying to multiple programs at Duke increases your chances and is allowed.
Our group is actively looking for motivated members to work on (1) methodology and theory in machine learning and statistics and/or (2) applications in AI Health.
News
- [2/2026] I was honored to receive the 2026 Leo Breiman Junior Award from the ASA Section on Statistical Learning and Data Science (SLDS). Named in honor of Dr. Leo Breiman, a pioneering figure in machine learning whose foundational contributions include CART, bagging, and random forests, this award recognizes outstanding theoretical or methodological contributions to machine learning and computational statistics with substantial impact on both the field and practical applications. I am especially inspired by Dr. Breiman's influential perspective on the "two cultures" of statistical modeling, which helped shape modern data science.
- [2/2026] Planner aware path learning in diffusion language models training was accepted as an oral presentation at ICLR 2026!
- [1/2026] I was honored to receive a Teaching Excellence Recognition from the Duke University School of Medicine for BIOSTAT 915 (High-Dimensional Statistics), recognized as both a Top Instructor and a Top-Rated Course in Fall 2025. News
- [10/2025] Our paper Why Do Transformers Fail to Forecast Time Series In-Context? was selected as an oral presentation (3 out of 68 submissions) for What Can('t) Transformers Do? @ NeurIPS 2025.
- [4/2025] My former PhD advisee, Yuetian Luo, has accepted an offer to become a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Department of Statistics, Rutgers University. Congratulations!
- [2/2025] The former visiting student in our group, Jingyang Li, has accepted a position as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Statistics & Data Science at the School of Management, Fudan University, starting in January 2026. Congrats!
- [12/2024] PhD student Shiyi Jiang has successfully defended her PhD thesis. She will join the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia University Medical Center as a postdoctoral research fellow after graduation. Congrats!
- Join us to celebrate Ed Hammond! Ed Hammond 90th Celebratory Scientific Symposium "From Foundations to Future of Informatics in Health." January 9–10, 2025, Washington Duke Inn, Durham, NC. For more information, visit the Ed Hammond Symposium website.
- [03/2024] My former PhD advisee, Yuchen Zhou, has accepted an offer to become a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Department of Statistics, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Congratulations!
- [03/2024] I was extremely honored and humbled to receive the COPSS Emerging Leader Award. This award recognizes early career statistical scientists who show evidence of and potential for leadership and who will help shape and strengthen the field.
- [01/2024] Runshi Tang has received an honorable mention award in the 2024 Student Paper Competition of the ASA Statistical Learning and Data Science Section for his paper "Mode-wise Principal Subspace Pursuit and Matrix Spiked Covariance Model." His paper stood out among 79 submissions this year. Congrats!
- [03/2023] Our paper "Timeline registration for electronic health records" won the Data Science Distinguished Paper Award from the 2023 AMIA Informatics Summit (only one paper received this award). (News)
- [10/19/2022] My recently graduated PhD student Yuetian Luo won the 2023 IMS Lawrence D. Brown Award (this distinction is given to three PhD students in the IMS community)! Yuetian will deliver an award lecture at the Joint Statistical Meetings in Toronto, Canada in August 2023. (IMS News)
- [8/2022] I received the IMS Tweedie Award (2022) (IMS News) and presented at the IMS New Researcher Conference. This award is given by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics to a single young researcher each year (previous awardees).
- [5/2022] Yuetian graduated and will join the University of Chicago Data Science Institute as a postdoctoral fellow starting in 7/2022.
- [10/26/2021] My PhD student Rungang, as one of three recipients in the IMS community, won the 2022 IMS Lawrence D. Brown Award! Rungang will deliver an award lecture at the 2022 IMS Annual Meeting in London.
Contact Information
E-mail: anru.zhang@duke.edu