Hongru Zhao

I am the IRSA Faragher Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow for 2025–2026 in the School of Statistics at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities and serve as Seminar Coordinator for Fall 2025.

Contact:
355 Ford Hall Building
224 Church St SE, Minneapolis, MN 55455

Email: zhao1118 at umn dot edu

My research interests lie broadly in high-dimensional statistics, generative AI and diffusion models, reinforcement learning from human feedback, astrostatistics, sequential analysis, quantum tomography, random matrix theory, nonconvex optimization.

Here is a current copy of my CV.

Recent highlights

My latest preprints cover quantum tomography, self-consuming generative models, and stochastic gravitational-wave background detection.

Education

• Ph.D. in Statistics, University of Minnesota (2025) — Adviser: Adam J. Rothman
• M.S. in Mathematical Sciences, University of Minnesota (2020)