Dr. Nan Zhang is a Professor in the Warrington College of Business, University of Florida. He is also serving as an expert (i.e., part-time program director) for the Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) program, National Science Foundation (NSF). Dr. Zhang received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Texas A&M University before rising through academic ranks to Professor of Computer Science at George Washington University. Before joining UF, he also served as Professor of Information Sciences and Technology at Pennsylvania State University and Professor of Information Technology and Analytics at American University, Washington DC. His first stint at NSF was as a Program Director in the Information and Intelligent Systems (IIS) division from 2016-2017, in which capacity he co-chaired the federal interagency working group on information privacy research.
Dr. Zhang’s current research focuses on the societal implications of artificial intelligence (AI) and the integration of machine learning and data analytics in social sciences. His research on these topics has been supported by federal agencies such as NSF, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and Army Research Office (ARO), and companies such as Amazon and Meta. His work was recognized by awards such as the Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Research Highlight, the ACM Special Interest Group on Management of Data (SIGMOD) Research Highlight Award, the NSF CAREER award, and several best paper awards from leading research conferences. He served as an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering and ACM SIGMOD, and a guest associate editor for Management Information Systems (MIS) Quarterly and European Physical Journal (EPJ) Data Science.