PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Zheng Tracy Ke

Also known as Tracy Ke

Zheng Tracy Ke is a statistician whose work applies statistical methods to text and network analysis, including topic modeling and methods for pretrained language models. She earned degrees in mathematics and physics at Tsinghua University and operations research and financial engineering at Princeton, then held faculty posts at Chicago and Harvard. Her work includes MADStat, a corpus of scholarly papers used to study topics, coauthorship and citation networks. She received an NSF CAREER Award and the IMS Peter Gavin Hall Early Career Prize. She is Professor of Statistics at Harvard University.

Works
99
Citations
1,012
h-index
17

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 27 October 2026.

Timeline

  1. 2009–2014

    Tsinghua and Princeton degrees

    She earns a BS in mathematics and physics at Tsinghua University in 2009, then completes a PhD in operations research and financial engineering at Princeton University in 2014.

  2. 2014

    Covariate-assisted screening

    Ke coauthors “Covariate Assisted Screening and Estimation,” a procedure that uses linear filtering to make a covariance matrix sparse for variable screening.

  3. 2014–2023

    Faculty posts in Chicago and Harvard

    Ke joins the University of Chicago as an assistant professor of statistics in 2014 and moves to Harvard as an assistant professor in 2018. She becomes an associate professor at Harvard in 2023.

  4. 2020

    ASA and NSF early-career awards

    She receives the ASA Gottfried E. Noether Young Scholar Award and an NSF CAREER Award in 2020.

  5. 2021

    The Peter Gavin Hall Prize

    Ke receives the IMS Peter Gavin Hall Early Career Prize in 2021.

  6. 2022–2024

    MADStat and text analysis

    In 2022, Ke coauthors “Co-citation and Co-authorship Networks of Statisticians.” With collaborators, she compiles MADStat, a corpus of 83,000 papers from 36 journals across 41 years, and uses it to study topics, citations and coauthorship. Her 2024 review surveys text-analysis methods from topic models to neural language models and discusses Topic-SCORE.

  7. 2025

    A Poisson-process topic model

    Ke coauthors a 2025 topic model that represents document embeddings from a pre-trained language model with a Poisson point process and topic-specific base measures.

  8. Since 2026

    Professor of Statistics at Harvard

    Ke becomes Professor of Statistics at Harvard University in 2026.

Career

  1. Since 2026Harvard UniversityProfessor of Statistics
  2. 2023–2026Harvard UniversityAssociate Professor
  3. 2018–2023Harvard UniversityAssistant Professor
  4. 2014–2018University of ChicagoAssistant Professor of Statistics

Education

  1. 2014Princeton UniversityPhD in operations research and financial engineering
  2. 2009Tsinghua UniversityBS in mathematics and physics

From the biography.

Checked career sources: tracyke.net, stevanovichcenter.uchicago.edu, news.uchicago.edu.

Colleagues

People with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

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  1. Zheng(Tracy) Ke | Home tracyke.net. Checked 27 October 2026.
  2. Zheng Tracy Ke | Stevanovich Center for Financial Mathematics stevanovichcenter.uchicago.edu. Checked 27 October 2026.
  3. Covariate assisted screening and estimation arxiv.org. Checked 27 October 2026.
  4. Changing the face of physical sciences: Progress for women researchers news.uchicago.edu. Checked 27 October 2026.
  5. Zheng(Tracy) Ke | RESEARCH tracyke.net. Checked 27 October 2026.
  6. Recent Advances in Text Analysis arxiv.org. Checked 27 October 2026.
  7. Poisson-Process Topic Model for Integrating Knowledge from Pre-trained Language Models arxiv.org. Checked 27 October 2026.