My current interests revolve around graphical models, model selection, and large-scale optimization. I am particularly interested in developing statistical procedures that are both computationally efficient and statistical sound. I often use/develop computationally efficient algorithms to tackle large-scale problems that involve big data volume and/or large model size. I am also interested in tackling problems that involve dataset of different modalities such as multimedia data, which often involves image, audio/video, and text. Targeted applications include graphical modeling for gene networks and brain connectivity networks, and image/video analysis.

Yunzhang Zhu joined the statistics faculty in 2014.