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Xiaotian Zheng

I am a research fellow at the Centre for Environmental Informatics (CEI) within the University of Wollongong. My research at CEI with Noel Cressie and Andrew Zammit-Mangion involves developing new statistical methods for understanding and predicting Antarctic biodiversity, as well as statistical downscaling of regional climate variables with uncertainty quantification for biodiversity studies. The research is part of Securing Antarctica’s Environmental Future (SAEF), an Australian Research Council (ARC) Special Research Initiative that aims to understand, manage, and forecast the environmental changes taking place across the Antarctic region.

My research interests lie in developing parametric and nonparametric methods for learning from complex and dependent data. Some research areas I currently focus on include spatial statistics, probabilistic downscaling (from coarse to fine resolutions), point process modeling, data integration, transfer learning, and statistical deep learning. Methods development in these areas is strongly motivated by addressing real-word scientific challenges, particularly in ecological and environmental applications, among others.

I received my Ph.D. in Statistical Science in 2022 from the Department of Statistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where I worked on mixture modeling for non-Gaussian spatial and temporal processes, advised by Athanasios Kottas and Bruno Sansó.

Upcoming activities and recent news

Aug 2025: Topic-contributed talk (Session: Recent advances in interpretable model-based geostatistics for analyzing complex spatial data) at JSM in Nashville, USA.

Mar 2025: I accepted an assistant professor position in the Department of Statistics at the University of Georgia, starting August 2025.

Jan 2025: Paper on “Spatial-statistical downscaling with uncertainty quantification in biodiversity modelling” accepted at Methods in Ecology and Evolution.

Jan 2025: Paper on “A new family of error distributions for Bayesian quantile regression” accepted at Bayesian Analysis.

Dec 2024: Invited talks at TIES 2024 at the University of South Australia (Mawson Lakes Campus), Australia.

Oct 2024: Seminar at the Department of Statistics, UNSW Sydney, Australia.

Aug 2024: Paper on “Bayesian geostatistical modeling for discrete-valued processes” received the 2023 Wiley-TIES Best Environmetrics Paper Award.

Aug 2024: Contributed talk at the Joint Statistical Meetings in Portland, USA.

July 2024: Invited talk at the 3rd Bayesian Nonparametrics Networking Workshop at the National University of Singapore, Singapore.