Zhang Wenyang, chair professor in the Department of Accounting and Information Management of the Faculty of Business Administration at the University of Macau (UM), has once again been appointed associate editor of the Journal of the American Statistical Association (ABS4), one of the three most prestigious journals in the field of statistics.

The Journal of the American Statistical Association (JASA) is the flagship journal published by the American Statistical Association, the world’s largest and second-oldest community of statisticians founded in Boston in 1839. Established in 1888, JASA is one of the oldest and most prestigious journals in statistics. It covers a wide range of statistical topics, including theoretical statistics, applied statistics, computational statistics, and data analysis methods, and publishes research papers of the highest quality. Many significant advancements in statistical theory, methodology, and applications were first published in this journal. For instance, the paper proposing the Kaplan-Meier estimator*, which led to a breakthrough in statistical methodology, was published in JASA. This paper has the highest number of citations among all papers in the field of statistics and, according to Journal Citation Reports, is among the top five most cited papers in the entire field of science.

Zhang currently serves as the associate editor of both the Annals of Statistics (ABS4*) and the Journal of the American Statistical Association (ABS4), and is one of the few prominent scholars in Asia to hold these positions. He is a renowned scholar in the field of statistics and his main research interests include big data analysis, financial data analysis, nonparametric modelling, time series analysis, spatial data analysis, multi-level modelling, survival analysis, and structural equation modelling. In addition, he was a member of the Research Section Committee of the Royal Statistical Society of the UK, making him the third Chinese to serve on this committee in the history of the society.