Avatar

Xiaotian Zheng

I am Research Fellow (postdoc) at the Centre for Environmental Informatics (CEI) in the National Institute for Applied Statistics Research Australia (NIASRA) of the University of Wollongong. My research at CEI, with Noel Cressie and Andrew Zammit-Mangion, involves developing new statistical methods for understanding and predicting Antarctic biodiversity, as well as data fusion and statistical downscaling for regional climate variables with uncertainty quantification. The research is part of the Securing Antarctica’s Environmental Future (SAEF), an Australian Research Council (ARC) Special Research Initiative that aims to understand, manage, and forecast the environmental changes taking place across the Antarctic region.

My research interests broadly lie in parametric and nonparametric methods for complex and dependent data. Currently my research focuses on spatial and spatio-temporal statistics, statistical downscaling and data fusion, point process modeling, mixture models, uncertainty quantification, and transfer learning, with applications in ecology, climate change, and the environmental sciences. I am also interested in methods for high-dimensional data and scalable algorithms for large data sets.

I received my Ph.D. in Statistical Science in 2022 from the Department of Statistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where I worked on mixture modeling for non-Gaussian spatial and temporal processes, advised by Athanasios Kottas and Bruno Sansó.

I am currently on the 2024-2025 academic job market.

Upcoming activities and recent news

Dec 2024: Invited talks at TIES 2024 at the University of South Australia (Mawson Lakes Campus), Australia.

Oct 2024: Seminar at the Department of Statistics, UNSW Sydney, Australia.

Aug 2024: Our paper “Bayesian geostatistical modeling for discrete-valued processes” was fortunate to be selected as the recipient of the 2023 Wiley-TIES Best Environmetrics Paper Award (selected from all papers published in Environmetrics in 2023).

Aug 2024: Contributed talk at the Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM) in Portland, USA.

July 2024: Invited talk at the 3rd Bayesian Nonparametrics Networking Workshop at the National University of Singapore, Singapore.

May 2024: Seminar (online) at the Department of Statistics, Oregon State University, USA.

Dec 2023: Invited talk (online) at CFE-CMStatistics (hybrid conference) in Berlin, Germany.

Dec 2023: Contributed talk at the Australian Statistical Conference (ASC) at the University of Wollongong, Australia.

Dec 2023: Contributed talk at the 2nd Bayesian Nonparametrics Networking Workshop at Monash University, Australia.

Nov 2023: Seminar at the School of Economics, University of Sydney, Australia.

Oct 2023: Seminar for the Global Climate Change Week (GCCW) at the University of Wollongong, Australia.

Aug 2023: Topic-contributed talk at the Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM) in Toronto, Canada.

July 2023: Contributed talk (online) at the TIES Regional Meeting (hybrid conference) in Peterborough, Canada.

July 2023: Contributed talks at the 6th Spatial Statistics conference at the University of Colorado, USA.

May 2023: Our team within CEI in NIASRA won first place in one of the categories of the 2023 KAUST Competition on Spatial Statistics for Large Datasets.

May 2023: Invited talk at the 13th Workshop on Bayesian Inference for Stochastic Processes (BISP13) in Madrid, Spain.

Jan 2023: Student Paper Award from the Business and Economics Statistics Section of the ASA.