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 amortized inference, diffusion models, transfer learning, operator networks, and causal representation learning, with applications to climate science, biodiversity science, and infectious diseases.

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 #

• Securing Antarctica’s Environmental Future (SAEF)
• Center for Environmental Informatics (CEI)

PhD students #

• Shaolin Xiang, Statistics (co-advising with Dr. Yang Yang), University of Georgia
• Kyle Fuentes-Keuthan, Statistics, University of Georgia

Master’s students #

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

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