Biography

Dr. Zhang is currently professor and chair of the UCF Department of Statistics & Data Science. He received his Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of Alberta, Canada. Before joining UCF in 2015, he was an assistant/associate professor of statistics at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks and an associate/full professor of statistics at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.

While at Nebraska he served as a mathematical statistician at National Cancer Institute (NCI). His research at NCI led to the creation of the government website ‘CI*Rank’ under the NCI portal (https://surveillance.cancer.gov/cirank/). The website presents ranked, age-adjusted cancer incidence and mortality rates by state, county, and special regions in the U.S. It has become a major source for researchers and the general public to obtain the information on the health condition of the community in the U.S., and a useful tool to help the government’s policy making and to evaluate the effect of a current policy or healthcare program.

Dr. Zhang’s research interests include general statistical methodology, Bayes and empirical Bayes methodology, bioinformatics, large scale multiple hypothesis testing and its applications, financial portfolio optimization, sampling technology, statistical methods related to influenza virus genotyping and big data analytics.

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