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Background

I am a tenured faculty member with joint primary appointments in the Department of Biostatistics & Bioinformatics and Department of Computer Science at Duke University. I was an assistant professor of statistics at UW-Madison before joining Duke. I received my Ph.D. 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 at 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 & Methodology);

Associate Editor for Statistica Sinica;

Associate Editor for Statistics and Its Interface;

Area Chair for 2023, 2024 International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR);

Some key words of my research: tensor learning, generative models, high-dimensional statistics, electronic health records, healthcare, microbiome studies, ... You can find a list of our group's publications from the tab above, on arXiv, or on Google Scholar.

I won the COPSS Emerging Leader Award (2024), IMS Tweedie Award (2022), as featured 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.

For prospective Ph.D. students: Please apply to the Ph.D. programs in Biostatistics & Bioinformatics, Computer Science, Electrical & Computer Engineering, or CBB Program. Prospective Ph.D. students interested to work with me can mention this on their applications. Applying to multiple programs at Duke increases your chance 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

• [4/2025] My former PhD advisee, Yuetian Luo, has accepted an offer to become a tenure-track Assistant Professor at 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] My PhD supervisee Shiyi Jiang has successfully defended her Ph.D. 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 at the Department of Statistics, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Congratulations!
• [03/2024] I was extremely honored and humbled to received 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 stands out from 79 submissions this year. Congrats!
• [03/2023] Our paper "Timeline registration for electronic health records" won the Data Science Distinguished Paper Award from 2023 AMIA Informatics Summit (only one paper received this award). (News)
• [10/19/2022] My recently graduated Ph.D. student Yuetian Luo won the 2023 IMS Lawrence D. Brown Award (this distiction is given to three Ph.D. students among the IMS community)! Yuetian will deliver an award lecture at the Joint Statistical Meetings at Toronto, Canada in August, 2023. (IMS News)
• [8/2022] I have received the IMS Tweedie Award (2022) (IMS News) and presented at the IMS New Researcher Conference. This award is given by Institute of Mathematical Statistics to a single young researcher each year (previous awardees).
• [5/2022] Yuetian graduated and will join University of Chicago Data Science Institute as a postdoc fellow starting in 7/2022.
• [2/2022] Our work on Wishart-type matrix concentration bound has been accepted by Electronic Journal of Probability.
• [10/26/2021] My Ph.D. student Rungang, as the one of three receipients among 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