Rate My Professor Xinwei Deng

Xinwei Deng is a Professor in the Department of Statistics at Virginia Tech, a position he has held since June 2022, following promotions from Associate Professor (2016-2022) and Assistant Professor (2011-2016). He previously served as Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 2009 to 2011. Deng earned his Ph.D. in Industrial and Systems Engineering, with a major concentration in Statistics and minor in Optimization, from the Georgia Institute of Technology in August 2009, advised by Professors C. F. Jeff Wu and Ming Yuan. He received his B.S. in Mathematics from Nanjing University, China, in 2003. He is also a Cathie and Tom Woteki Data Science Faculty Fellow since 2022, College of Science Faculty Fellow (2019-2022), and co-director of the VT Statistics and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

Deng's research focuses on the interface between experimental design and machine learning, uncertainty quantification and digital twins, modeling and analysis of high-dimensional data, covariance matrix estimation and its applications, design and analysis of computer experiments, and statistical methods for nano and emerging technologies. His contributions include over 100 peer-reviewed publications, more than 70 invited presentations at national and international conferences, and research supported by 21 grants, including six from the National Science Foundation. Key publications are "Active Learning via Sequential Design with Applications to Detection of Money Laundering" (Journal of the American Statistical Association, 2009), "A Statistical Approach to Quantifying the Elastic Deformation of Nanomaterials" (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2009), "Modeling and Active Learning for Experiments with Quantitative-Sequence Factors" (Journal of the American Statistical Association, 2024), and "Continual Learning and Its Industrial Applications: A Selective Review" (WIREs Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, in press). Awards include the Soren Bisgaard Award Winning Paper in Quality Engineering (2024), IISE Transactions Best Paper Award on Quality and Reliability Engineering (2017), election as Member of the International Statistical Institute (2017), and multiple top-cited article recognitions. He serves as Associate Editor for Annals of Applied Statistics (2022-present), Statistica Sinica (2020-present), International Statistical Review (2017-present), and other journals.