Rate My Professor Zhigang Yao

Zhigang Yao is an Associate Professor in the Department of Statistics and Data Science at the National University of Singapore (NUS). He holds a courtesy appointment in the Department of Mathematics at NUS. His research interests center on the interaction between statistics and geometry, non-Euclidean statistics, and statistical inference for complex data.

Yao earned his PhD in Statistics from the University of Pittsburgh. Prior to joining NUS, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher with Victor Panaretos. He served as Assistant Professor at NUS from 2014 to 2020 before his promotion to Associate Professor. He has also held visiting faculty positions, including at Harvard University. Yao has contributed to the field through publications such as the 2014 paper “Principal Flows” co-authored with Victor M. Panaretos and Tung Pham, published in the Journal of the American Statistical Association. His work explores manifold fitting approaches and frameworks for analyzing high-dimensional and non-Euclidean data, with applications in areas such as metabolomic and genomic data analysis. He maintains an active research group focused on these intersections and supervises graduate students in statistics and data science.