Dr. Zhang is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of Missouri. He received his Ph.D. degree in Statistics from Penn State in 2020, after which he worked with climate scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for two years. His research focuses on extreme value theory and flexible spatial extremes modeling, which has been used to study a variety of weather processes and to detect changes in their long-term climatology. He also incorporates deep learning techniques to analyze dependent extremes to datasets with massive number of locations.