Rate My Professor Yuzhou Zou

Yuzhou Zou is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Oakland University. He specializes in microlocal analysis, inverse problems, partial differential equations, and mathematical physics. Zou earned his Ph.D. in Mathematics from Stanford University in 2021, where his dissertation, titled 'Microlocal analysis with applications to seismic inverse problems,' was supervised by András Vasy. He previously obtained a B.S. with honors in Mathematics and a B.A. in Chemistry from the University of Chicago in 2016, graduating with a GPA of 3.83. His academic career includes serving as Boas Assistant Professor at Northwestern University from 2022 to 2025, mentored by Jared Wunsch, and as Postdoctoral Scholar-Employee at the University of California, Santa Cruz from 2021 to 2022, working with François Monard.

Zou's research has produced several key publications, including 'Asymptotic Expansion of the Eigenvalues of a Bathtub Potential with Quadratic Ends' in Communications in Mathematical Physics (2025), 'The hyperbolic X-ray transform: new range characterizations, mapping properties and functional relations' with Nikolas Eptaminitakis and François Monard in Inverse Problems and Imaging (2026), 'Helmholtz quasi-resonances are unstable under most single-signed perturbations of the wave speed' with Euan A. Spence and Jared Wunsch in Journal of Differential Equations (2025), 'The Morse index theorem for mechanical systems with reflections' with Jared Wunsch and Mengxuan Yang in Nonlinearity (2024), and 'Boundary triples for a family of degenerate elliptic operators of Keldysh type' with François Monard in Pure and Applied Analysis (2024). He has received awards such as the Mathematics Distinguished Service Award from Stanford University Department of Mathematics (2021), the Robert Osserman Teaching Award from Stanford (2019), Honorable Mentions for the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (2018 and 2016), and the Paul R. Cohen Memorial Prize from the University of Chicago Department of Mathematics (2016). Zou has delivered numerous invited talks at conferences including the Great Lakes Mathematical Physics Meeting (2025 and 2024), SIAM Conference on Imaging Science (2024), and Applied Inverse Problems 2023 in Göttingen, Germany, as well as seminars at institutions like UC Berkeley, Stanford University, and Northwestern University.