Jian (Frank) Zou is currently Assistant Professor of Statistics at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. He worked at NISS as a postdoctoral fellow from 2009-2011. The project involved developing novel spatio-temporal models that provide early and accurate detection of disease outbreaks using syndrome (collection of clinical symptoms) data that are monitored as indicators of potential disease outbreaks. These models can also be applied to threats such as biological weapon attacks. Zou also works on financial statistics to develop novel methods for large volatility matrix estimation and inference, asset allocation and risk analysis, and evaluate its performance based on high frequency financial data.
Zou obtained his Ph.D in statistics from University of Connecticut in 2009. He also got M.S. in Computer Science and B.S. in Mathematics from Shandong University in China. Zou enjoys teaching at all levels and wide ranges of statistics courses. He has been enthusiastically involved in student advising and mentoring. He believes that the objectives of teaching are to give to the students the best possible preparation for their future studies and for their future employments, to make them able to master the concepts they are learning, and to give them the ability to use it creatively in more complex contexts as well as develop it further to suit more general problems. In his free time, Zou enjoys reading and swimming.