Jiwei Zhao, PhD
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Jiwei Zhao
Associate Professor
Affiliated Faculty
Office: 5687 Morgridge Hall, 1205 University Ave, Madison WI 53706 |
Short Bio
Jiwei Zhao is currently an Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, affiliated with the Departments of Statistics and of Biostatistics & Medical Informatics.
His research interests include semiparametric statistics, the tradeoff between efficiency and robustness, domain adaptation and transfer learning, missing data analysis and causal inference. He also focuses on domains such as patient-reported outcome, clinical trial, real-world evidence and real-world data, survey data, aging, mental health, and cancer. His work has been published in top-tier statistical journals as well as in leading machine learning conferences. His research has been consistently supported by the US National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.
Jiwei is now Associate Editor for Annals of Applied Statistics, JRSS Series A: Statistics in Society, Scandinavian Journal of Statistics, and Action Editor for Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR). He is also Area Chair for ICML in 2026, and AISTATS in 2024, 2025, 2026.
Research Interests
Jiwei Zhao's research focuses on applying semiparametric techniques to understand the complex structure of modern biomedical data sets, usually in the pursuit of efficiency, robustness, and the tradeoff between the two. Specifically, his work has concentrated in the fields of:
distribution shift, domain adaptation and transfer learning,
weakly supervised machine learning (semi-supervised, label noise, etc.),
missing data analysis and causal inference.
He also conducts research on developing trustworthy statistical inference methods for AI-predicted data and, more broadly, for synthetic data, with a focus on reliability, robustness, and principled uncertainty quantification.
Together with Dr. David Francis, Jiwei co-leads the NIH R01 project NIH/NIDCD/R01DC021431 (2023-2028) entitled CoPE II: Individualizing Patient-Reported Outcomes in Patient Care for Vocal Fold Paralysis in the Clinic and in Research. Currently patients are being recruited across a 37-site national collaborative of high-volume voice centers.
Jiwei's research is also supported by the NSF through the DMS/NIGMS program under award numbers 1953526 and 2122074 and the Statistics program under award number 2310942 , as well as by the Data Science Institute of UW-Madison.
Group News and Activities
The group is consistently looking for self-motivated researchers (postdocs [position.pdf], PhD students, Master students, and undergrads) with strong statistical and/or computational skills to join us. For prospective PhD students, please consider applying Statistics PhD program with Statistics option, or Statistics PhD program with Biostatistics option, both administered by the Department of Statistics, or Biomedical Data Science PhD program administered by the Department of Biostatistics & Medical Informatics.
Jiwei serves as the Program Chair for the Statistical Learning and Data Science (SLDS) section of the ASA.
Jiwei serves as the IMS Program Chair for the ENAR Spring Meeting.
At the SDSS (Symposium on Data Science & Statistics), Jiwei will teach a short course entitled Towards Trustworthy Statistical Inference with Black-Box AI Predictions.
Together with Dr. Chris Holmes of Oxford and Dr. Beth Tipton of Northwestern, Jiwei will co-organize the workshop New Horizons on Model Transportability and Data Integration in June 2026 at the IMSI of Chicago!
Jiwei serves as the Scientific Program Committee Co-Chair for SLDS 2026 Conference: Inference and Intelligence, to be held in NYC in November 2026.
More coming soon!
In 2026:
In 2027:
