Yang Feng () is a statistician and data scientist. He is a professor of biostatistics in the School of Global Public Health at New York University. He is also serving as an affiliate faculty member at both the NYU Center for Data Science and the NYU Center for Practice and Research at the Intersection of Information, Society, and Methodology.
Feng received his B.S. in Mathematics from Special Class for the Gifted Young in University of Science and Technology of China in 2006. He earned his Ph.D. in Operations Research from Princeton University in 2010, under the supervision of Jianqing Fan.
Following his doctorate, Feng joined the faculty of the Department of Statistics at Columbia University, where he served before moving to New York University in 2019.
FengâÂÂs research lies at the intersection of modern statistics and machine learning, emphasizing both theoretical development and methodological innovation. His work covers:
In 2016, Feng received an National Science Foundation CAREER Award.
In 2017, Feng became an elected member of the International Statistical Institute (ISI).
In 2022, he was elected a Fellow of the American Statistical Association (ASA) âÂÂfor development of effective, practical, and efficient statistical methods that are backed by theory and are relevant and accessible to practitioners; for wide dissemination of methods in publicly available software; and for outstanding teaching.âÂÂ
In 2023, he was named a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS) "for outstanding contributions to high-dimensional statistics, nonparametric statistics, social network analysis, and statistical machine learning; for statistical software development; and for dedicated service to the profession."
Feng has held editorial positions at several leading statistics journals. He currently serves as Reviews Editor for the Journal of the American Statistical Association and for The American Statistician for the 2026âÂÂ2028 term. He has also served as Associate Editor for journals including: