Weining Shen

Weining Shen is an Associate Professor of Statistics at the University of California, Irvine. He earned his Ph.D. in Statistics from North Carolina State University in 2013, where his thesis won the Leonard J. Savage Dissertation Award. Following this, he served as a postdoctoral fellow at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. His research focuses on Bayesian statistics, nonparametric methods, and biostatistics, with applications in healthcare, biology, and sports analytics. Key collaborations include work with UNC Chapel Hill on cardiac hypertrophy, MD Anderson Cancer Center on liver cancer risk prediction, and UNC Chapel Hill’s Qian Lab on cardiac reprogramming using single-cell RNA sequencing. He has also pioneered Bayesian clustering approaches for NBA player shot patterns and developed a scoring system for hepatocellular carcinoma risk using biomarker data.

Shen’s work bridges statistical theory and practice, receiving a five-year Simons Foundation grant (2017) to advance interdisciplinary statistical modeling. His research emphasizes flexible, efficient methods for complex data, with recent contributions to sports understanding benchmarks for large language models and spatial functional data clustering.

• Education: Ph.D., Statistics, North Carolina State University (2013)
• Postdoctoral Training: M.D. Anderson Cancer Center (2013-2015)

Research Highlights: Cardiac metabolism modeling, sports analytics, and precision medicine. His Bayesian nonparametric frameworks address heterogeneous data challenges in healthcare and sports, while his work on survival analysis and immunotherapy outcomes advances oncological research.

• Awards: Leonard J. Savage Dissertation Award (2013)
• Grants: Simons Foundation Grant (2017-2022)

Labs/Teams: Collaborations with UNC Chapel Hill, MD Anderson, and UCI’s Statistics Department. Active in interdisciplinary initiatives linking statisticians with biologists and clinicians.