Kai Zhu

Biography

Dr. Kai Zhu is a tenured Associate Professor at the University of Michigan, where he holds joint appointments in the Institute for Global Change Biology, the School for Environment and Sustainability, and the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. In addition, Dr. Zhu is Affiliated Faculty with the Michigan Institute for Data Science, the Michigan Center for Applied and Interdisciplinary Mathematics, and the Michigan Institute for Computational Discovery and Engineering. Dr. Zhu’s research interests revolve around global change biology, ecological modeling, and environmental data science. He brings together his expertise in ecology, statistics, and computer science to advance the understanding of how plants and soil respond to environmental changes. His research spans a wide range of scales, from local experiments to global analyses. Dr. Zhu has been recognized for his contributions to the field, having received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, been elected as an Ecological Society of America Early Career Fellow, and won the New Phytologist Tansley Medal. Dr. Zhu completed his postdoctoral fellowship in global ecology at Stanford University, and earned his PhD degree in ecology and master’s degree in statistics from Duke University.