The Department of Statistics and Data Science (SDS) is pleased to announce that Xiaofeng Shao is joining us as a Professor of Statistics and Data Science, with a joint appointment in the Department of Economics, beginning in January 2025.
Professor Shao earned his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2006. He began his academic career at the Department of Statistics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), where he was promoted to Professor of Statistics in 2016. He is internationally recognized as a leading scholar in time series analysis and high-dimensional inference. He is an elected fellow of both the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS) and the American Statistical Association (ASA). He received the Tjalling C. Koopmans Econometric Theory Prize (2009, with Wei Biao Wu) and held the position of LAS Data Science Founder Professorial Scholar at UIUC. Additionally, Professor Shao serves on the editorial boards of the Annals of Statistics, the Journal of the American Statistical Association, the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B, and the Journal of Time Series Analysis.
When asked about his move, Professor Shao said “Statistical and Data Science is off to a great start with excellent new hires, and I am excited to be part of it. I was particularly attracted by WashU’s excellence in undergraduate education, the great vision for building a modern data science department, and the unique opportunity of working with both SDS and Economics departments to advance data science at the intersection of the two fields”.
“We are excited that Professor Shao is joining our faculty, bringing with him first-class scholarship at the interface between statistics and econometrics, along with his rich experience in graduate student mentoring,” said Xuming He, Chair of Statistics and Data Science.
