Kang Zhao is the Leonard A. Hadley Professor in Business Analytics and Senior Associate Dean at the Tippie College of Business, University of Iowa. He holds a faculty appointment in the Department of Business Analytics and is affiliated with the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Informatics. He previously served as Department Executive Officer (2023–2025) and Faculty Director of the Master of Business Analytics program (2020–2023). His educational background includes: PhD in Information Sciences and Technology, Pennsylvania State University MS in Computer Science, Eastern Michigan University BE in Electrical and Information Engineering, Beijing Institute of Technology Dr. Zhao's research lies at the intersection of data science and network analytics, focusing on social and business networks. His work explores social influence, engagement, and health outcomes in online health communities; develops advanced recommendation systems for social media and live streaming platforms; applies 'people analytics' to scholarly and sports data; models information and behavior diffusion; and analyzes supply chain network resilience. His research has been featured in prominent media outlets such as MIT Technology Review, Forbes, BBC, and The Washington Post. The 15 most recent publications reflect a strong trend in applying graph neural networks, dynamic representation learning, and deep learning to model complex networked systems in health, finance, and social media. Key themes include user engagement prediction, misinformation diffusion, stock movement forecasting, and personalized recommendations using temporal and structural network data. His scientific achievements have been recognized with numerous awards: Top Cited Article, Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (2024, 2023) Journal of Operations Management Ambassador Award (2024) Charles A. Taff Research Excellence Award, Tippie College of Business (2023) Best Paper Award, INFORMS Workshop on Data Science (2017) Early Career Faculty Research Award, Tippie College of Business (2016) Dr. Zhao has successfully led multiple research grants as Principal or Co-Principal Investigator from the National Science Foundation (NSF), National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Institute of Museum and Library Services. His projects span topics including gender gaps in academic science, smoking cessation networks, misinformation in health communities, and disaster resilience in public libraries. He actively mentors a cohort of PhD and master’s students, many of whom have secured positions in academia and leading industry firms. He also contributes to the academic community through editorial roles at top journals such as Decision Support Systems , Electronic Commerce Research and Applications , and Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology . He leads the Data and Network Analytics Research Group at the University of Iowa, which focuses on cutting-edge research in network science, machine learning, and data mining applied to real-world social and business problems.
