UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Lingzhou Xue, associate professor of statistics at Penn State and associate director of the National Institute of Statistical Sciences (NISS), has been selected as one of the inaugural members of the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies (COPSS) Leadership Academy. Xue was selected for “his innovative contributions to the theory and methodology of high-dimensional statistics and statistical learning, and for his outstanding and prolific service to the profession and to society.”
“Being selected as a member of the COPSS Leadership Academy is a very high honor for an early-career statistical scientist,” said Murali Haran, professor and head of statistics at Penn State. “As a faculty member in the Department of Statistics, Lingzhou has established an exemplary record as a researcher, and his exceptional record of service to the department as well as to the profession — notably as the associate director of the National Institute of Statistical Sciences (NISS) — makes him an asset to Penn State.”
COPSS created the academy to highlight the important role that early career statistical scientists play in shaping the future of the discipline. Members of the academy will have the opportunity to share their vision for the field with each other and the statistical community.
“Lingzhou demonstrated his leadership ability from the first year he joined the NISS team,” said James Rosenberger, professor emeritus of statistics at Penn State and director of NISS. “Now as associate director, he finds creative ways to engage the broader community by organizing outreach activities and workshops and inviting the top researchers to participate in NISS hosted events.”
Xue’s research focuses on improving statistical inference for “high-dimensional,” complex datasets, where a large number of features is measured for each observation, and in massive networks. He is also interested in statistical machine learning and statistical applications in biological, environmental, and social sciences.
“Lingzhou’s original research covers theory, methodology, and applications and has high impact on statistics and data science,” said Runze Li, Eberly Family Chair in Statistics at Penn State. “His excellence in fundamental research, deep commitments in interdisciplinary collaborations, and strong leadership represent the epitome of what COPSS Leadership Academy is all about. Lingzhou certainly deserves this recognition.”
Xue’s previous awards and honors include the International Consortium of Chinese Mathematicians Best Paper Award in 2019, the Bernoulli Society New Researcher Award in 2019, and the International Chinese Statistical Association International Conference Young Researcher Award in 2016. He has published papers in top-tier scientific journals including the Annals of Statistics, Journal of the American Statistical Association, Biometrika, the Journal of Econometrics, the Journal of Accounting & Economics, INFORMS Journal on Optimization, Environmental Science & Technology, Nature Materials, and Proceedings of the IEEE. He is an elected member of the International Statistical Institute.
Prior to joining the faculty at Penn State in 2014, Xue was a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University from 2012 to 2013. He earned master’s and doctoral degrees in statistics from the University of Minnesota in 2011 and 2012, respectively, and a bachelor’s degree in statistics from Peking University in 2008.