Join us for an in-person Distinguished Speaker event featuring Xiao-Li Meng, an internationally renowned statistician, data scientist, and former Dean of the Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Widely recognized for his pioneering contributions to statistical science, data analysis, and interdisciplinary research, Meng has helped shape statistics and data science through groundbreaking scholarship, academic leadership, and innovative approaches to understanding uncertainty in an increasingly data-driven world.
Lecture title and abstract will be made available in the coming weeks!
Xiao-Li Meng is the Whipple V. N. Jones Professor of Statistics at Harvard and Founding Editor-in-Chief of Harvard Data Science Review. He received his BS in mathematics from Fudan University in 1982 and his PhD in statistics from Harvard in 1990. After serving on the University of Chicago faculty (1991–2001), he returned to Harvard, where he chaired the Department of Statistics (2004–2012) and served as Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (2012–2017). His research spans foundations of statistical inference—including interactions among Bayesian, fiducial, and frequentist perspectives; standard, imprecise, and quantum probability; data utility and privacy; and multi-source, multi-phase, and multi-resolution inference—statistical methodology and computation, including posterior predictive p-values, EM, MCMC, bridge and path sampling, and heavy-tail approximations; and applications across natural, social, and medical sciences and engineering, including complex modeling in astronomy and astrophysics, disparities in mental health services, and statistical information in genetic studies. In 2001, Meng received the COPSS President’s Award, recognizing the outstanding statistician under age 40, and in 2020 was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.