ZHILING GU

Welcome to my website! My name is Zhiling Gu. I am currently a postdoctoral associate at Yale School of Public Health, advised by Professor Yize Zhao. 

Prior to that, I obtained my Ph.D. degree in Statistics at Iowa State University (ISU), advised by Professor Lily Wang and Professor Dan Nettleton. 

My research focus is developing interpretable and scalable statistical methods for data arising from public health and medicine, including mental health, aging, and Alzheimer’s Disease. My work involves theory development in functional data analysis, network analysis, spatiotemporal data analysis, statistical foundations of artificial intelligence, and nonparametric learning, with applications in neuroimaging, electronic health records, and environmental studies.

Email: zhiling.gu [at] yale [dot] edu

Address: 300 George St., New Haven, CT 06511

Links: Google Scholar, NCBI Bibliography, ORCID, GitHub

Submitted Manuscripts  

4. Gao, S., Ding, S., Zhang, X., Gu, Z., Zhao, Y. (2025+, Under Review at Imaging Neuroscience). The Mediating Role of Structural Connectivity in Genetic Effects on Functional Brain Networks.

3. Consagra, W., Gu, Z., Zhang, Z. (2024+, Under Review at Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics). NeuroPMD: Neural Fields for Density Estimation on Product Manifolds.

2. Gu, Z., Yu, S., Wang, G., Wang, L. (2024+, Under Revision at Journal of American Statistical Association). Boosting AI-Generated Biomedical Images with Confidence through Advanced Statistical Inference.

1. Gu, Z., Li, X., Wang, G., Wang, L. (2024+, Under Revision at Journal of Time Series Analysis). Spatiotemporal Heterogeneity Learning: Generalized SpatioTemporal Mixed Coefficient Models with Structure Identification.

 

Published Articles  

8. Gu, Z., Yu, S., Wang, G., Lai, M. J., & Wang, L. (2025). TSSS: a novel triangulated spherical spline smoothing for surface-based data. Journal of Nonparametric Statistics, 1–30. 

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/10485252.2025.2449886  

[An earlier version won runner-up of Statistical Methods in Imaging Conference 2023 (SMI 2023) Student Paper Competition, theory track]

7. Lopez, V. K., Cramer, E. Y., Pagano, R., Drake, J. M., O’Dea, E. B., Adee, M., [et al, including Gu, Z.] (2024). Challenges of COVID-19 Case Forecasting in the US, 2020–2021. PLoS Computational Biology, 20(5). 

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1011200

6. Ananya, A., Holden, K. G., Gu, Z., Nettleton, D., Mallapragada, S. K., Wannemuehler, M. J., Kohut, M. L., Narasimhan. B. (2023). “Just right” combinations of adjuvants with nanoscale carriers activate aged dendritic cells without overt inflammation. Immunity & Ageing. 20, 10. 

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/s12979-023-00332-0

5. Cramer, E. Y., Ray, E. L., Lopez, V. K., [et al, including Gu, Z.] (2022). Evaluation of individual and ensemble probabilistic forecasts of COVID-19 mortality in the United States. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 119(15), e2113561119. 

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2113561119

4. Cramer, E., Ray, E., Lopez, V. K., [et al, including Gu, Z.] (2022). The United States COVID-19 Forecast Hub dataset. Scientific Data. 9(1), 462. 

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-022-01517-w  

3. Kim, M., Gu, Z., Yu, S., Wang, G., Wang, L. (2021). Methods, Challenges, and Practical Issues of COVID-19 Projection: A Data Science Perspective. Journal of Data Science, 19(2), 219-242.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.6339/21-JDS1013

2. Wang, G., Gu, Z., Li, X., Yu, S., Kim, M., Wang, Y., Gao, L., Wang, L. (2021). Comparing and integrating US COVID-19 data from multiple sources with anomaly detection and repairing. Journal of Applied Statistics, 50(11-12), 2408-2434. 

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/02664763.2021.1928016

1. Wang, L., Wang, G., Li, X., Yu, S., Kim, M., Wang, Y., Gu, Z., Gao, L. (2021). Modeling and forecasting COVID-19. AMS: Notices of The American Mathematical Society, 68, 585-595.

DOI: https://www.ams.org/journals/notices/202104/rnoti-p585.pdf


Teaching

Instructor @Iowa State University



Teaching Assistant @Iowa State University


Presentations & Activities