Nan Zhang, Ph.D.

I joined Notre Dame as a Professor of Information Technology, Analytics, and Operations (ITAO) in 2025. My research examines the foundations of machine learning and AI, their role in scientific inquiry, and their implications for human judgment. I develop theoretical and methodological approaches to understanding how AI systems learn, reason, and behave; using them to advance social and behavioral science; and evaluating their consequences for fairness, human dignity, and agency.

I was a Professor of Management at UF from 2022 to 2025. My research there focused on fairness issues in machine learning and data analytics.

I served as a part-time program director (Expert SGE) at the National Science Foundation for the Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) program, focusing on the intersection of cybersecurity / privacy and machine learning / data science.

I served as a Professor of Information Technology and Analytics at Kogod School of Business, American University. My research there focused on the proper use of data analytics and machine learning to understand human behavior.

After serving at the NSF, I had a (relatively) short stint as a Professor in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at the Pennsylvania State University.

As a program director at the National Science Foundation, my job was to facilitate and manage research projects in fields such as data management and analytics, information privacy, etc.

I ascended the academic career ladder during my nine years at the George Washington University, serving as an assistant, associate, and then full professor of computer science.

I started my academic career as an assistant professor of computer science and engineering in the College of Engineering, University of Texas at Arlington.

I received my Ph.D. in computer science from Texas A&M University. My Ph.D. research focused on the issue of privacy protection in data mining, data analytics, and information sharing.

Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on knowledge and Data Engineering (2016 - 2021); Associate Editor for ACM SIGMOD (2023); Guest Associate Editor for MIS Quarterly, EPJ Data Science (Special Issue).

Program Committee Co-Chair for Intl Conf on Web-Age Information Management (WAIM 2016), IEEE Symp on Privacy-Aware Computing (PAC 2018), IEEE Intl Conf on Intelligence and Security Informatics (ISI 2020). Finance Chair for ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD 2018).

for Privacy Research & Development Federal Inter-Agency Working Group, which was tasked with implementing a framework for coordinating federally-funded privacy research and development to support the National Privacy Research Strategy.