Affiliation
Professor, Department of Mathematics, University of Arizona

Education
University of Wisconsin, Madison: PhD, Statistics (2002)
Beijing University: BS, Mathematics (1996)

About Hao
Hao Helen Zhang joined the University of Arizona in 2011. Her research, grounded in statistical methods and theory, is primarily in the areas of nonparametric statistics, model selection, statistical machine learning, and high-dimensional data analysis.

Motivated by the theoretical and computational challenges posed by modern big, complex, and noisy data, Hao has devoted her efforts to developing flexible and robust approaches that are both mathematically appealing and computationally feasible in effectively serving the practice needs of statistics. At the University of Arizona, she leads the National Science Foundation (NSF)–supported research institute, UA-TRIPODS (Transdisciplinary Research in the Principles of Data Science), to build theoretical foundations in data science by fostering deep-level collaborations between statistics, computer sciences, and mathematics. She has also been actively engaged in a wide range of interdisciplinary projects, collaborating on new discoveries and improving methodologies used in real-world problems such as those in cancer research. Her research has been supported by the NSF, National Institutes of Health, and National Security Agency, including the NSF Career Award (2007).

Hao is an elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association (2015), an elected member of the International Statistical Institute (2015), and an elected Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (2016). She has been selected as the Medallion Lecturer (2019) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and has published more than 70 scientific articles, co-authored one book, and advised 21 PhD students.

Hao was born and raised in Taiyuan, Shanxi Province, China. From a young age, she was passionate about mathematics. She gained a solid training through her undergraduate work at Beijing University, China’s top program in mathematics. Later, Hao became fascinated by mathematically based real-world questions. Consequently, she decided to pursue an advanced degree in statistics and data science. She earned her PhD in statistics from the University of Wisconsin at Madison under the direction of Grace Wahba.

Hao has served on the editorial boards of many professional journals, including the Journal of the American Statistical Association, Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics, Biometrics, and Statistical Analysis and Data Mining. She is currently the editor-in-chief for STAT, the ISI’s journal for the rapid dissemination of statistical research. Hao also remains active in the American Statistical Association, serving on several sections—Nonparametric Statistics, Statistical Computing and Graphics, and Statistical Learning and Data Science—as well as other professional societies such as the Caucus for Women in Statistics.