People

Cristiano Villa

Associate Professor of Statistics, Duke Kunshan University

Email: cristiano.villa@dukekunshan.edu.cn

Prof. Cristiano Villa main research area is in Bayesian statistics, with particular interest in objective methods. His output has been published in several peer-reviewed journals and presented at international conferences, such as the ISBA International Conference, the O-Bayes conference, and the ERCIM conference. In addition to his research, Prof. Villa is deeply committed to teaching and enjoys interacting with students. His teaching interests include probability, statistics, linear modelling, and risk management. Before joining Duke Kunshan University (DKU), Prof. Villa was a member of the Newcastle University (UK) and the University of Kent (UK). Prior to joining academia in 2014, he worked as an auditor and as an advisor for KPMG in several countries, including, Italy, UK, New Zealand, and Singapore. He holds an M.Sc. and a Ph.D. from the University of Kent, UK.

Dang Xing Chen

Assistant Professor of Mathematics, Duke Kunshan University

Email: dangxing.chen@dukekunshan.edu.cn

His research focuses on mathematical modeling and computation in quantitative finance and efficient numerical algorithms for partial differential equations and integral equations arising in science and engineering. Chen has a B.Sc. in financial mathematics from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and a Ph.D. in applied mathematics from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He held postdoctoral positions at the University of California, Berkeley, from 2017 to 2021.

Ding Ma

Assistant Professor of Atmospheric and Environmental Science, Duke Kunshan University

Email: ding.ma318@dukekunshan.edu.cn

His broad research interests are climate variability, weather extremes, and atmospheric dynamics. The essential motivation for his research is to better understand and predict the behavior of the climate system, which has led to his focus on the variability of the large-scale atmospheric circulation and the related weather extremes. His teaching interests at Duke Kunshan include environmental science and physics. He has had papers published in leading academic journals including Nature Communications, Journal of Climate, and Journal of Atmospheric Sciences. He is a member of the American Geophysical Union and American Meteorological Society. Ma has a B.A. in physics for Peking University and a Ph.D. in climate dynamics from Harvard University. After receiving his Ph.D., he joined Columbia University as an Earth Institute Fellow.

Dongmian Zou

Assistant Professor of Data Science, Duke Kunshan University

Email: dongmian.zou@dukekunshan.edu.cn

His primary research is in the intersection among applied harmonic analysis, machine learning and signal processing. He is especially interested in robust representations and structures in geometric and graph deep learning. His teaching interests at Duke Kunshan include calculus, linear algebra, principles of machine learning, statistical machine learning. He has had papers published in leading academic journals in various areas including Applied and Computational Harmonic Analysis and IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, and at and conferences such as the International Conference on Learning Representations. Zou has a B.Sc. in mathematics from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and a Ph.D. in applied mathematics from the University of Maryland, College Park. Before joining Duke Kunshan, he served as a post-doctorate researcher at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.

Huaxiong Huang

Professor of Mathematics, Duke Kunshan University

Email: huaxiong.huang@dukekunshan.edu.cn