I received my Ph.D. in Statistics, along with a concurrent M.A. in Economics, from Duke University in 2012 under the supervision of Professor James O. Berger. Before that, I received my M.S. in Probability and Mathematical Statistics from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2008. I joined the Department of Statistics at the University of Connecticut in 2012 as an Assistant Professor, was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2019, and became Full Professor in 2025. From 2021 to 2022, I was a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Statistics at Harvard University.

 

My research develops principled Bayesian models and scalable inferential methods, with rigorous theoretical guarantees, to uncover latent structure in complex data that are multi-source, evolving over time, and often incomplete or constrained. My work spans latent variable models, Gaussian processes and nonparametric methods, and Bayesian structure learning, with applications in educational testing, engineering, mobile health, neuroscience, ecology, drug development, and machine learning. Much of this research is carried out through interdisciplinary collaborations with researchers in both academia and industry.

 

My work has been recognized by the Michael Woodroofe Award from the Caucus for Women in Statistics and Data Science (2026) and the Strategic Goal Award for Expanding Research Impact from UConn’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (2026). In 2019, I received the National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (NSF CAREER) Award, and in 2022, I was named an mHealth Scholar of the NIH mHealth Training Institute. Earlier, I received the Jeffreys Excellence Prize for Best Methodological Poster at the 2013 Objective Bayes Conference, and my interdisciplinary work published in PNAS received coverage from several high-profile national and international media outlets. I have been an elected member of the International Statistical Institute (ISI) since 2017. For my teaching, I have received the Excellence in Teaching Recognition from UConn’s Provost Office three times.

 

I co-chaired the 2025 ICSA Applied Statistics Symposium, which earned me the ICSA President’s Citation Award in 2026, and I currently serve as Co-Chair of the ICSA Program Committee. I also served as Treasurer of the New England Statistical Society from 2022 to 2024 and as Co-Chair of the Prize Committee of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis from 2023 to 2025. Currently, I am an Associate Editor of the Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics, Psychometrika, and Sankhya A; Chair of the ASA Committee on Statistical Partnerships Among Academe, Industry, and Government; and Program Chair (2026) and Chair-Elect (2027) of the ASA Social Statistics Section.