On April 30, 2025 (local time April 29), the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) announced its newly elected members, including 120 regular members and 30 international members. Professor Jun Liu, Head of the Preparatory Committee for the Department of Statistics and Data Science at Tsinghua University, was elected as a member of the NAS.
Professor Jun Liu
Jun Liu earned his Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from Peking University in 1985 and his Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of Chicago in 1991. Since 2000, he has served as a tenured professor in the Department of Statistics at Harvard University, and concurrently as a professor in the Department of Biostatistics from 2003 to 2015. Previously, he held positions as an assistant professor in the Department of Statistics at Harvard (1991–1994) and as assistant professor, associate professor, and tenured professor in the Department of Statistics at Stanford University (1994–2004).In 2015, he led the establishment of the Center for Statistical Science at Tsinghua University, serving as its Honorary Director until 2024. In July 2024, he became Head of the Preparatory Committee for the establishment of the Department of Statistics and Data Science at Tsinghua University.
Professor Liu has made outstanding contributions to research in Bayesian statistics, Monte Carlo methods, statistical machine learning, state-space models and time series, bioinformatics, and computational biology, exerting profound influence in the fields of big data processing and machine learning. His accolades include:
The COPSS Presidents’ Award (2002, regarded as the highest international honor in statistics);
The Morningside Medal in Applied Mathematics (2010, the top honor for Chinese applied mathematicians under 45, awarded triennially);
Recognition as a Highly Cited Mathematician by ISI (2014);
The Hsu Prize from the International Chinese Statistical Association (2016, awarded triennially to statisticians under 51);
Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (2004) and the American Statistical Association (2005);
Fellow of the International Society for Computational Biology (2022).
He has also served as co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of the American Statistical Association (JASA) and as associate editor for several top-tier international statistics journals. As of May 2025, he has published over 300 papers in leading journals such as Science, Nature, Cell, JASA, and JMLR, along with one monograph, accumulating over 90,000 citations (Google Scholar). To date, he has supervised more than 40 Ph.D. students and over 30 postdoctoral researchers.
