Runze Li appointed co-editor of the Journal of the American Statistical Association
Runze Li, Eberly Family Chair Professor in Statistics, has been selected to serve as co-editor-elect of the Journal of the American Statistical Association (JASA) for 2026 and as co-editor of JASA from 2027 to 2029.
Established in 1888 and published quarterly, the Journal of the American Statistical Association has long been considered the premier journal of statistical science. Articles focus on statistical applications, theory, and methods throughout all disciplines that make use of data, including economic, social, biological, physical, engineering, and health sciences and the humanities.
Li's research interests include statistical methods, such as variable selection and feature screening for high dimensional data, nonparametric modeling and semiparametric modeling and their application to social behavior science research. He is also interested in longitudinal data analysis and survival data analysis and their application to biomedical data analysis.
Li’s previous honors and awards include the U.S. National Science Foundation Career Award in 2004. In 2012, he received the United Nations' World Meteorological Organization Gerbier-Mumm International Award. He is a Fellow of Institute of Mathematical Statistics, American Statistical Association, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was honored with the International Chinese Statistical Association Distinguished Achievement Award in 2017 and a Faculty Research Recognition Awards for Outstanding Collaborative Research by the Penn State College of Medicine in 2018. Li was also honored with the Penn State Eberly College of Science’s Distinguished Mentoring Award in 2023 and the Harry C. Carver Medal from the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in 2024. Li was named a Highly Cited Researcher in Mathematics by Clarivate (formerly Thomson Reuters) in 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2017. He was co-editor of the journal Annals of Statistics and served as associate editor of Annals of Statistics and the journal Statistica Sinica. He currently serves as associate editor of the Journal of the American Statistical Association and the Journal of Multivariate Analysis.
Before joining the faculty at Penn State, Li earned a doctoral degree in statistics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2000. He joined the faculty at Penn State in 2000 and was promoted to associate professor in 2005 and to professor in 2008. He served as the chair of Penn State’s graduate program in statistics from 2007 to 2012 and from 2024 to present. Li also served as the associate department head of statistics from 2018 to 2023 and was named distinguished professor of statistics in 2012 and Verne M. Willaman Professor of Statistics in 2014. Since 2018, he has been the Eberly Family Chair Professor of Statistics.