Hui Zou is a professor in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics and a member of the Data Science and AI Institute (DSAI) at Johns Hopkins University. Prior to joining Johns Hopkins, Hui was the inaugural Dr. Lynn Y.S. Lin Distinguished Professor at the University of Minnesota where he served for 21 years.
His research interests include statistical learning, high-dimensional models, statistical computing, and the application of modern statistical methods in business, health, and engineering. A recurring theme in his work is the development of principled, computationally efficient methods for high-dimensional problems where both statistical rigor and practical performance matter. His contributions to high-dimensional statistics have been widely adopted by researchers across statistics and machine learning. His papers on the elastic net, the adaptive lasso, and sparse PCA are the most-cited papers of all time in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B, the Journal of the American Statistical Association, and the Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics, respectively. His paper on concave penalized models received the Best Paper Award in Applied Mathematics at the International Congress of Chinese Mathematicians (ICCM 2019).
Zou is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the American Statistical Association (ASA), and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS). He is the recipient of the 2025 Pao-Lu Hsu Award and the Founders of Statistics Prize (jointly with Trevor Hastie).
He serves as Co-Editor of Statistica Sinica (August 2026–July 2029) and Associate Editor of the Journal of the American Statistical Association. His previous editorial service includes action editor for the Journal of Machine Learning Research (2008–2018), associate editor for the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B (2008–2012), and associate editor for the Annals of Statistics (2011–2018, 2022–2024).
His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Office of Naval Research, and the McKnight Foundation.
Zou received his B.S. in Physics from the University of Science and Technology of China and his Ph.D. in Statistics from Stanford University.