My recent research projects focus on exploring doubly-indexed spatial and spatio-temporal processes, marked point processes, statistical downscaling, and species distribution models, at the interface with diffusion models, transfer learning under covariate shifts, and causal representation learning, with applications to climate science and biodiversity science.

If you are interested in getting involved in these topics, feel free to reach out at xzheng (at) uga.edu with your CV.


Research affiliations #


PhD students #


Master’s students #

  • Zhixin Gan, PhD student in Real Estate and Master’s student in Statistics

Student collaborators #

  • Heming Liu, PhD student in Statistics, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
    - Research: Non-Markovian diffusion models (2026 - present)

  • Skylar Shi, PhD student in Statistics, The Ohio State University
    - Research: Copula mixture models for marked point processes (2024 - present)

  • Charlotte Patterson, PhD candidate in Biological Science, Queensland University of Technology
    - Research: Integrated species distribution models and spatial transfer (2024 - 2025)