Associate Professor and Associate Head, Department of Statistics Pengsheng Ji is an Associate Professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of Georgia. He holds a Ph.D. in Statistics from Cornell University, as well as M.S. and B.S. degrees in Statistics and Mathematics from Nankai University. His research spans social networks, graph data, machine learning, big data analytics, bibliometrics, bioinformatics, and infectious disease epidemiology. Dr. Ji’s recent publications appear in premier venues such as AAAI, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, Journal of Machine Learning Research, and Scientific Reports. His scholarly contributions include work on graph neural networks, community detection, and text analysis, reflecting a strong engagement with methodological advances in modern data science. Dr. Ji has received several distinctions for his research, including the M. G. Michael Award from the University of Georgia and discussion paper selections in the Annals of Applied Statistics and Journal of Business & Economic Statistics. As an educator, he emphasizes building intuition and insight through step-by-step discovery, fostering students’ ability to connect statistical reasoning with practical data-driven problem solving. His approach reflects a commitment to mentoring the next generation of data scientists and advancing the understanding of complex systems through rigorous statistical modeling. Education: PhD, Statistics, Cornell University MS, Statistics, Nankai University BS, Mathematics, Nankai University Research Research Interests: Social Networks Network/Graph Data Machine Learning Big Data Analytics Infectious Disease Epidemiology Bibliometrics Bioinformatics Of note: Research Interests Network Data Analysis Machine Learning Variable/Feature Selection Nonparametric Testing Rare and Weak Signals in Big Data Scientometrics and Bibliometrics Bioinformatics
