Tian Zheng

When asked what she loves about her field, statistics professor Tian Zheng GSAS’02 refers to a quotation from mathematician and statistician John Tukey: “The best thing about being a statistician is that you get to play in everyone’s backyard.”

“Throughout my research career, I’ve put emphasis on different words of this quote,” Zheng says. As a young researcher, she explored new uses for data with a variety of collaborators — including political scientists, sociologists, geneticists, climate scientists and ecologists. “At that time, I liked the word ‘play,’ because I was having a lot of fun with the work,” she says.

Now, she says, she focuses more on “everyone’s backyard.” “If I can be an innovator and a connector for multiple disciplines, that’s where I’m happiest residing.”

Simply put, Zheng develops novel methods to explore and understand complex data patterns. Every data point — i.e., any recorded bit of information — tells a story, she says; a statistician’s job is to connect the stories into a meaningful narrative. “And as a storyteller, my audience is the scientific community,” Zheng says. “I want to help scientists use new data observed by technology, so we can know more and improve outcomes.”

She has recently collaborated with University Professor Nabila El-Bassel on an effort to use AI to better understand fatal opioid overdose and to combat drug abuse. Zheng is also the deputy director of Columbia’s Learning the Earth with Artificial Intelligence and Physics (LEAP); the group’s mission is to improve the reliability and utility of climate projections with machine learning.

Zheng joined the statistics department in 2002, and became its first female chair in 2019. (She was also the associate director of the Data Science Institute from 2017 to 2020.) She has since racked up a number of accolades, including a 2017 Columbia Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching and a 2021 Lenfest Distinguished Columbia Faculty Award; in 2023, Zheng was named a fellow by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, one of the highest honors for researchers.

Her career path is perhaps unsurprising, considering she grew up in academia. Zheng was born in Shanghai and raised in Beijing, the daughter of two university professors. “I’ve spent my whole life inside a campus,” she says. During summers when she was in elementary school, Zheng helped her mother, a computer scientist, collect and log data into computer servers.

Zheng loved to draw and thought she might study architecture, but opted for a mathematics major. Then in her junior year, during an internship entering data at a local hospital, she saw statistical software in use for the first time and fell in love.

“It was just amazing to me, seeing what [the hospital statisticians] did,” she says. “By adding several variables, these data sets became really meaningful.” Zheng completed her B.Sc. in applied mathematics in 1998, and then switched to statistics when she arrived in Morningside Heights for grad school.

After more than a decade of teaching, Zheng was inspired to change up her methods in 2015, after her daughter started at a school that employed experiential learning. “Instead of just getting a lesson, she needed to look things up and show her work for assignments,” Zheng says. “That made me think that my lecture-style way of teaching wasn’t the best use of my time.”

She created a new class, “Applied Data Science,” a project-based course where students work in teams and creativity is encouraged. Zheng says that by breaking away from the typical large-room lecture format, her students were able to expand their thinking and draw inspiration from each other. “For them to recognize the teamwork that goes into science and celebrate their contributions is really a great gift we can give to our students,” she says.

In that same spirit, Zheng meets regularly with a “community of practice,” alongside colleagues from other science disciplines, to create research-inspired experiences for introductory STEM courses. The team coined the term “Course-based Undergraduate Research- Integrated Original Studies,” or CURIOS.

“My goal in education is not to convert everybody to be a statistician,” Zheng says. “Statistics is a different way of looking at the world. This way of looking has become ever more important as our society becomes more data driven. I hope, through CURIOS activities, students can see that even seemingly rudimentary things you learn in an intro class can still answer important questions. That’s what education should be about.”