Xiao-Li Meng
President
(2017-2018)
Xiao-Li Meng, Dean of the Harvard
University Graduate School of Arts and
Sciences (GSAS), Whipple V. N. Jones
Professor and former chair of Statistics at
Harvard, is well known for his depth and
breadth in research, his innovation and
passion in pedagogy, and his vision and
effectiveness in administration, as well as
for his engaging and entertaining style as a
speaker and writer. Meng has received
numerous awards and honors for the more than
150 publications he has authored in at least
a dozen theoretical and methodological areas,
as well as in areas of pedagogy and
professional development; he has delivered
more than 400 research presentations and
public speeches on these topics, and he is
the author of "The XL-Files", a regularly
appearing column in the IMS (Institute of
Mathematical Statistics) Bulletin. His
interests range from the theoretical
foundations of statistical inferences (e.g.,
the interplay among Bayesian, frequentist,
and fiducial perspectives; quantify ignorance
via invariance principles; multi-phase and
multi-resolution inferences) to statistical
methods and computation (e.g., posterior
predictive p-value; EM algorithm; Markov
chain Monte Carlo; bridge and path sampling)
to applications in natural, social, and
medical sciences and engineering (e.g.,
complex statistical modeling in astronomy and
astrophysics, assessing disparity in mental
health services, and quantifying statistical
information in genetic studies).
Meng
received his BS in mathematics from Fudan
University in 1982 and his PhD in statistics
from Harvard in 1990. He was on the faculty
of the University of Chicago from 1991 to
2001 before returning to Harvard as Professor
of Statistics, where he was appointed
department chair in 2004 and the Whipple
V. N. Jones Professor in 2007. He was
appointed GSAS Dean on August 15, 2012.
