Rate My Professor Jean Yang

Professor Jean Yang is a Professor in the School of Mathematics and Statistics within the Faculty of Science at the University of Sydney. She earned a Bachelor's degree with first-class honours and the University Medal in mathematics and statistics from the University of Sydney in 1996. She completed her PhD in statistics at the University of California, Berkeley in 2002, with a dissertation titled 'Statistical methods in the design and analysis of gene expression data from cDNA microarray experiment,' supervised by Terry Speed. Yang joined the University of Sydney faculty upon her return to Australia in 2005. Her research specializes in statistical bioinformatics, biomedical data science, applied statistics, computational statistics, and machine learning, with a focus on high-dimensional biomedical data analysis. She is the founder and Inaugural Director of the Sydney Precision Data Science Centre, fostering interdisciplinary research in precision data science for biomedical applications. Yang actively contributes to teaching and postgraduate supervision, earning recognition as one of SUPRA's Supervisors of the Year in 2024.

Yang's contributions have been honoured with the Moran Medal from the Australian Academy of Science in 2015 for significant advancements in statistical methodology for molecular data in biomedical research. In 2025, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of New South Wales. Her work has garnered substantial impact, evidenced by over 40,996 citations on Google Scholar. Key publications include 'Bioconductor: open software development for computational biology and bioinformatics' (Gentleman et al., Genome Biology, 2004, 14,936 citations), a foundational open-source platform in bioinformatics; 'Normalization for cDNA microarray data: a robust composite method addressing single and multiple slide systematic variation' (Yang et al., Nucleic Acids Research, 2002, 4,468 citations); 'Statistical methods for identifying differentially expressed genes in replicated cDNA microarray experiments' (Dudoit et al., Statistica Sinica, 2002, 2,229 citations); 'Design issues for cDNA microarray experiments' (Yang and Speed, Nature Reviews Genetics, 2002, 1,121 citations); and 'Whole-genome landscapes of major melanoma subtypes' (Hayward et al., Nature, 2017, 1,634 citations). These publications have shaped methodologies in genomics and bioinformatics.