Rate My Professor Na Zou

Na Zou serves as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering within the University of Houston's Cullen College of Engineering. Before joining the University of Houston around 2023, she was an Assistant Professor at Texas A&M University, instructing courses such as Operations Research II, Total Quality Engineering, Engineering Data Analysis, and Distribution Information and Control Systems from 2016 to 2023. At UH, she currently teaches INDE 7397 Introduction to Data Mining. Her academic interests center on machine learning, network modeling and inference, and health informatics. Specifically, her research develops effective, efficient, and trustworthy machine learning algorithms and foundation models to tackle data challenges from large-scale, dynamic, and networked data in applications like health informatics, bioinformatics, brain informatics—including shortcut learning, interpretable machine learning, transfer learning, sparse learning, uncertainty quantification, dynamic network analysis, heterogeneous network embedding, anomaly detection, neuroimaging connectivity modeling, cognitive performance assessment, biomarker identification, and disease diagnosis and monitoring.

Na Zou has garnered significant recognition for her scholarly achievements. In 2025, she received the Junior Faculty Research Excellence Award and the Teaching Excellence Award from the University of Houston. Other honors include the AI in Research Award Finalist from Women in AI Awards, Best Paper Award at the 2nd INFORMS Conference on Quality, Statistics and Reliability, NSF Faculty Early Career Development Program award, Best Student Paper Finalist at AMIA 2023 Symposium, and election as president of the IISE Data Analytics and Information Systems Division. She secured a $169,982 NSF CISE-MSI Research Expansion Award in 2024 for the collaborative project "Towards Robust and Human-Aligned Deep Learning for Medical-Sensor Time Series," aimed at enhancing deep learning models for healthcare wearables, including Parkinson’s monitoring and elderly fall detection, in partnership with North Carolina State University and UT Rio Grande Valley. With over 3,280 citations documented on Google Scholar, her publications appear in prestigious venues such as Technometrics, IISE Transactions, ACM Transactions, IEEE Transactions, ICLR, ICML, NeurIPS, and KDD. Na Zou has contributed to public discourse through media interviews on trustworthy AI and AI in government operations, and serves in leadership roles in professional societies.