John Zito
Assistant Research Professor at Duke University
Durham, North Carolina, United States
Summary
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Top SchoolJohn Zito is an Assistant Research Professor and fifth-year PhD candidate in statistics with 10 years of research and applied experience spanning Bayesian methods and time series analysis. He combines academic teaching and mentorship—having led REU projects, capstone teams forecasting ER volumes, and multiple statistics courses—with hands-on research at institutions like the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland where he coauthored peer-reviewed Bayesian macroeconometrics work. An active open-source contributor, he has extended JuliaStats/Distributions.jl with matrix-variate distributions and robust unit tests, demonstrating both theoretical depth and practical software engineering. Based in Durham, NC, he blends rigorous probabilistic modeling with reproducible software practice, often translating complex methods into interpretable tools for students and policymakers.
11 years of coding experience
PhD, Statistics, PhD, Statistics at Rice UniversityBA, Mathematics, BA, Mathematics at Kenyon College
Stackoverflow
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Github Skills (10)
statistics10
mat10
probability-distribution10
matrix10
distributions10
linear-algebra10
algebra10
julia10
unit-testing9
data-science8
Programming languages (2)
Github contributions (5)
JuliaStats/Distributions.jl
Jul 2019 - Oct 2020
A Julia package for probability distributions and associated functions.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:13 reviews, 37 commits, 34 PRs in 1 year 3 months
Contributions summary:John primarily contributed to the `distributions.jl` Julia package by implementing and testing new probability distributions and related functions. They added the `MatrixNormal`, `MatrixTDist`, `MatrixBeta`, and `MatrixFDist` distributions, including constructors, properties, and sampling methods. Furthermore, the user fixed and tested conversion methods for existing distributions and added new unit tests.
juliastatisticsdata-scienceprobability-distributions
sta240-f25/sta240-f25.github.io
Jun 2025 - Aug 2025
Contributions:163 pushes, 1 branch in 2 months
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