Xiao-Li Meng

Who is Xiao-Li Meng?

Xiao-Li Meng is an award-winning Chinese American statistician, and the Whipple V. N. Jones Professor of Statistics at Harvard University. He received the COPSS Presidents' Award in 2001. He has written numerous research papers about Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms and other statistical methodology.

Since 2004 Meng has been Chair of Harvard's Department of Statistics, where he has helped create innovative new statistics courses designed to give students a more positive impression of the subject. He edited the journals Bayesian Analysis from 2003 to 2005 and Statistica Sinica from 2005 to 2008. On August 14, 2012, Xiao-Li Meng was appointed dean of Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

Meng received his B.Sc. from Fudan University in 1982 and his Ph.D. in statistics from Harvard University in 1990. He was elected a fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in 1997 and of the American Statistical Association in 2004.