Contact:
Harvard University
Department of Statistics
33 Oxford Street
Cambridge, MA 02140
Office:
Maxwell Dworkin 245
Email:
zke at fas.harvard. edu

Academic Positions

• 2023-present: Associate Professor of Statistics, Harvard University
• 2018-2023: Assistant Professor of Statistics, Harvard University
• 2014-2018: Assistant Professor of Statistics, University of Chicago

Education

• 2014: Ph.D. in Operations Research and Financial Engineering, Princeton University
• 2009: B.S. in Mathematics and Physics, Tsinghua University

Honors and Awards

• COPSS Emerging Leader Award, 2024
• Sloan Research Fellow, 2023
• IMS Peter Gavin Hall Early Career Prize, 2021
• ASA Gottfried E. Noether Young Scholar Award, 2020
• NSF CAREER Award, 2020
• IMS LAHA Award, 2013

Research Interests

• Network data analysis
• Text analysis and Natural Language Processing
• High-dimensional statistics
• Machine learning
• Bioinformatics and statistical genetics

Selected Publications

• Editor's invited review articles:
  
  • Ke, Ji, Jin and Li (2024). Recent Advances in Text Analysis. Annual Review of Statistics and Its Application.
    
  • Ke and Jin (2023). Special Invited Paper: The SCORE Normalization, Especially for Heterogeneous Network and Text Data. Stat.
    
  • Jin and Ke (2016). Rare and Weak Effects in Large-scale Inference: Methods and Phase Diagrams. Statistica Sinica.
    
• Editor's invited discussion paper and the MADStat data-collection project:
  
  • Ji, P., Jin, J., Ke, Z. and Li, W. (2022). Co-citation and Co-authorship Networks of Statisticians. Journal of Business & Economic Statistics. Rejoinder and 5 discussions (#1, #2, #3, #4, #5). MADStat project homepage.
• Text analysis:
  
  • Austern, M., Guo, Y., Ke, Z. and Liu, T. (2026). Poisson Process Topic Modeling for Integrating Knowledge from Pre-trained Language Models. Journal of the American Statistical Association.
  • Ke, Z., Kelly, B. and Xiu, D. (2026). Enhancing Investment Decisions with Sentiment Analysis: A Probabilistic Ranking Framework. Journal of the American Statistical Association.
  • Ke, Z. and Wang, M. (2024). Using SVD for Topic Modeling. Journal of the American Statistical Association.
  • Cai, T., Ke, Z. and Turner, P. (2024). Testing High-dimensional Multinomials with Applications to Text Analysis. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B.
• Network data analysis:
  
  • Jin, J., Ke, Z., Tang, J. and Wang, J. (2025). Network Goodness-of-Fit for the Block-model Family. Journal of the American Statistical Association.
  • Ke, Z. and Wang, J. (2024). Optimal Network Membership Estimation under Severe Degree Heterogeneity. Journal of the American Statistical Association.
  • Jin, J., Ke, Z. and Luo, S. (2024). Mixed Membership Estimation for Social Networks. Journal of Econometrics.
  • Jin, J., Ke, Z. and Luo, S. (2021). Optimal Adaptivity of Signed-Polygon Statistics for Network Testing. Annals of Statistics.
• High-dimensional statistics:
  
  • Ke, Z., Ma, Y. and Lin, X. (2023). Estimation of the Number of Spiked Eigenvalues in a Covariance Matrix by Bulk Eigenvalue Matching Analysis. Journal of the American Statistical Association.
  • Ke, Z., Fan, J. and Wu, Y. (2015). Homogeneity Pursuit. Journal of the American Statistical Association.
  • Ke, Z., Jin, J. and Fan, J. (2014). Covariate Assisted Screening and Estimation. Annals of Statistics.
• Genetics:
  
  • Chen, D., Tashman, K., Palmer, D., Bloemendal, A., Neale, B, Roeder, K., Churchhouse, C. and Ke, Z. (2022). A Data Harmonization Pipeline to Leverage External Controls and Boost Power in GWAS. Human Molecular Genetics.

Editorial Services

• Associate Editor, Journal of Statistical Learning and Data Science (2025-present)
• Associate Editor, Journal of Royal Statistical Society - Series B (2026-present)
• Associate Editor, Harvard Data Science Review (2024-present)
• Associate Editor, Journal of the American Statistical Association (2023-2025)

Organized Conferences and Workshops

• Workshop on Statistical Network Analysis and Beyong (SNAB), Nassau, Bahamas, 2024
• Analysis of Complex Data: Tensors, Networks and Dynamic Systems, Banff, Canada, 2024
• Harnessing the Power of Latent Structure Models and Modern Big Data Learning, Hangzhou, China, 2023
• New Advances in Statistics and Data Science (NASDS), Honolulu, Hawaii, 2022
• New Aspects of Statistics, Financial Econometrics, and Data Science, Chicago, Illinois, 2018

Other Online Profiles

• Google Scholar (link)
• Mathematics Genealogy (link)
• ORCID (link)

Miscellany

• The Yellow Mountain (Huangshan) is a renowned tourist attraction in China, recognized as both a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a UNESCO Global Geopark. The area gained additional fame as a filming location for scenes in the movie "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon." There are several towns in the Yellow Mountain area that are rich in ancient Chinese culture. For example, the Tunxi Ancient Street is an interesting place to visit.