The Department of Statistics welcomed Assistant Professor Xiang Ji on January 1, 2026. Ji was drawn to Iowa State by the department's long and strong history of academic leadership in the field of statistics.
Ji's research focuses on every component of statistical phylogenetics, from model development and advanced inference techniques to under-the-hood parallel computation libraries. His efforts have one central goal: solving biological questions through statistical methods and computational tools.
Ji's proudest professional accomplishment reflects his interdisciplinary approach: all his degrees are in different subjects (statistics, bioinformatics, material science and engineering, economics, and physics).
Collaborations constitute a significant proportion of Ji's research. He believes that applied statisticians should never work alone, and his work advances biology by collaborating with experimental biologists, developing statistical methods tailored toward specific biological hypotheses, and providing software tools.
Ji is collaborating with virologists interested in learning the evolution and diffusion patterns of various viruses through space and time and testing correlations of factors with key events in their evolution. He is also working with cancer biologists using Drosophila models to study cancer evolution.