Biography

Dr. Shunpu Zhang is a Professor in the Department of Statistics & Data Science at the University of Central Florida (UCF). He served as Chair of the department from 2015 to 2025 and has been instrumental in expanding academic programs in data science and analytics at UCF. His leadership included the development of Florida’s first Ph.D. program in Big Data Analytics, several joint M.S. programs, and a collaborative B.S. degree program in data science in partnership with three other departments.

Dr. Zhang received his Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of Alberta, Canada. Before joining UCF in 2015, he served as Assistant and Associate Professor of Statistics at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and later as Associate and Full Professor of Statistics at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. During his tenure at Nebraska, he also worked as a Mathematical Statistician at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), where he developed the CI*Rank website (https://surveillance.cancer.gov/cirank/), an important tool providing ranked, age-adjusted cancer incidence and mortality rates by U.S. state, county, and special regions. This platform continues to support researchers, policymakers, and the public in assessing community health and healthcare policies.

His research interests include general statistical methodology, Bayesian and empirical Bayesian methods, bioinformatics, large-scale multiple hypothesis testing, financial portfolio optimization, sampling techniques, statistical methods for influenza virus genotyping, and big data analytics.

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