		Brief Biography
		The game of Western philosophy and science is to trap the universe in the networks of words and numbers, so that there is always the temptation to confuse the rules, or laws, of grammar and mathematics with the actual operations of nature. — Alan Watts —

Dr. Mu Zhu joined the University of Waterloo in 2001, after receiving his PhD from Stanford University. He received his AB magna cum laude in 1995 from Harvard University, where he was elected a member of the Phi Beta Kappa Society. In 2006, he was selected as the (inaugural) recipient of the AusCan Scholarship, awarded jointly by the Statistical Societies of Australia and Canada to "outstanding young researchers." In 2011, he received a Discovery Accelerator Supplement Award from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada — an award given to "top-ranked researchers judged by their peers to show strong potential for becoming international leaders."

Dr. Zhu has consulted for a number of companies and government agencies — such as Freddie Mac, the Australian Taxation Office, and the Canada Border Services Agency — and continues to consult for various firms in the financial and media industries. While a graduate student, he also served as a director for a number of start-up companies in the San Francisco Bay Area. Between college and graduate school, he worked for a litigation consulting firm in New York. From 2004 to 2006, he served on the Pierre Robillard Award committee. Since 2005, he has been a member of the InfoRehab project, funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) to enhance musculoskeletal rehabilitation through more effective use of health information. He was a member of the program committee for the 2010 Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM) in Vancouver. Currently, he is serving as an Associate Editor for The American Statistician and for The Canadian Journal of Statistics, and as President-elect of the Business and Industrial Statistics Section, Statistical Society of Canada.

Dr. Zhu's research area is statistical machine learning. His doctoral committee was composed of Trevor Hastie (principal advisor), Robert Tibshirani and Jerome Friedman. His current interests include: kernel methods, ensemble methods, unbalanced classification (or rare target detection), variable selection, dimension reduction, multivariate analysis, health informatics, predictive analytics, and data mining. Born in China, educated in the United States, and a Canadian citizen, Dr. Zhu is married and lives with his wife and two children.

Brief Biography