Mengshi (Jack) Zhou

Overview

Mengshi (Jack) Zhou, PhD, is a data scientist and Senior Statistical Associate for Statistics and Data Science. Zhou has more than 8 years of experience developing and applying machine learning (ML), statistical, and natural language processing (NLP) models to tackle complex real-world problems, particularly in biomedical and public health.

Zhou works on a number of public health and clinical research projects, including the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS), where he is leading the efforts to automate code open-ended responses into standardized categories using NLP, ML, and deep learning methods. Zhou is also developing unsupervised ML approaches to analyze high-dimensional survey paradata, aiming to guide the data collection process. For the Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN), Zhou is developing NLP-based predictive models for analyzing electronic health records (EHRs) and is also conducting statistical analysis. For the CDC Virtual Network to Investigate the Effectiveness of COVID-19 and Influenza Vaccines and Evaluate the Burden and Epidemiology of Respiratory Viruses (VISION 2.0), he is developing NLP algorithms to extract patient phenotypes from free-text clinical notes.

Prior to joining Westat, Zhou was an Assistant Professor at St. Cloud State University. He is a member of the Editorial Board of Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience, and a reviewer for Bioinformatics and Scientific Reports. He has also published on biomedical informatics, pharmacoepidemiology, and statistical genetics.

Education

• PhD, Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Case Western Reserve University
• BS, Statistics, Beijing Institute of Technology