Name in Chinese: 吴振科 . Pronounced: “Jen-Kuh Wu”.

[Publications] [CV-pdf] [one-page CV pdf] [CV-overleaf]

[Google Scholar] [GitHub]

[][Contact] [Bio]

The best way to contact me is email (zhenkewu [arroba] umich [punto] edu). Direction to my office is here.

I am an Associate Professor (with tenure) in the Department of Biostatistics at University of Michigan and a faculty affiliate at Michigan Institute for Data and AI in Society (MIDAS).

[Position Openings] Please contact me for details if interested!

• [Feb 2025] Work period: May 1 - August 31, 2025. Summer AI + Health research project on reinforcement learning that integrates reinforcement learning, counterfactual fairness and budget constraint.
  • PhD/MS students. Link to position ad.

Research Theme:

Tagline: AI for affordable and individualized healthcare; computational and interventional digital health.

View publication samples by topic

My research is motivated by biomedical and public health problems and is centered on the design and application of statistical methods that inform health decisions made by individuals, or precision medicine. Towards this goal, I focus on two lines of methodological research: a) structured Bayesian latent variable models for clustering and disease subtyping, and b) study design, causal and reinforcement learning methods for evaluating sequential interventions that tailor to individuals’ changing circumstances such as in interventional mobile health studies. I am committed to developing robust, scalable, and interpretable statistical methods to harness real-world, high-dimensional, dynamic data for individualized health. The methods and software developed so far have supported studies in diverse scientific fields including infectious disease epidemiology, autoimmune diseases, mental health, behavioral health, and cancer. I am also exploring the intersection between generative AI and biostatistics.

I am deeply passionate about advancement of modern Bayesian latent variable methods, with a keen focus on developing tools that address pivotal public health challenges faced predominantly by low and middle-income countries (LMIC). My contributions include the development of general methods and the creation of publicly-accessible software tailored for world’s most updated pediatric pneumonia etiology estimates across seven sub-Saharan African and Southeast Asian countries. Additionally, in collaboration with demographers and statisticians, I’ve pioneered domain-adaptive mortality estimation for deaths occurring outside the civil registration and vital statistics systems using computer-coded verbal autopsy. Recently, I’ve been working to advance digital mental health for healthcare workers in Kenya, in collaboration with the Data Science Initiative in Africa. This effort draws upon my expertise in interventional and predictive mobile health, honed through pioneering studies in the US (Intern Health Study - world’s largest multi-year microrandomized trial, and Caregiver Quality of Life Study). I enjoy embracing and navigating the unique challenges presented within the LMIC contexts and seizing the opportunity therein to shape how statistics can effect meaningful change.

Keywords:

• Statistical: Hierarchical Bayesian models; Latent variable models; Nonparametric Bayes; Bayesian scalable computation; Causal inference; Reinforcement learning.

• Substantive: Precision medicine; Wearable device data; Mobile health; Infectious diseases dynamics; Mental health; Electronic health records/claims data; Healthcare policy; Clinical trials; Just-in-time adaptive interventions for behaviorial and psychiatric research; Computational Social Science.

Advising: We are recruiting motivated and hard-working people interested in Bayesian methods and computation, graphical models, causal inference, sequential decision making, reinforcement learning and large-scale health data analytics. If you want to get involved, please say hi.

• Please consider providing relevant information via Google Form here.

• Check this out and send me an email if interested in collaborating!

  • AI in Science Postdoctoral Fellowship Program; The program will pay a competitive salary plus benefits. Travel to funder’s AI in Science events will also be covered.

Working Group:

• Michigan Statistics for Individualized-healthcare Lab (MiSIL) weekly meeting schedules

I currently collaborate closely with

• Intern Health Study
• openVA - mortality estimation using verbal autopsy
• Center for Clinical Outcomes Development and Application (CODA)

• [Data Science in Africa] - the UZIMA-DS project.

• Precision Health Use Case: PROviding Mental Health Precision Treatment (PROMPT)
• Cancer Control and Population Sciences, Rogel Cancer Center
• The Michigan Genomics Initiative