CNAS celebrates Women's History Month with women making history in the sciences. Over the month of March, learn more about women scientists in the College of Natural & Agricultural Sciences at UC Riverside who are making history today.

Name: Xingping Cui
Title: Professor and Chair, Department of Statistics

Please share with us a brief description of your research.
I develop innovative statistical methods for genomic data analysis to discover genetic biomarkers for improving stress tolerance in crop plants, assisting human disease diagnosis and predicting drug efficacy in subgroups. 

How do you hope your research will impact the world around us?
My research projects are closely related to several science disciplines: cell biology, plant pathology, chemistry, medicine, mathematics, and statistics. I hope my research will provide new quantitative methods and computing tools to study a broad range of biological systems and obtain new knowledge for developing novel chemical or genetic strategies for treating crop diseases, human diseases. I also hope my research will provide valuable interdisciplinary training opportunity for our next generation data scientists.

What inspires you? 
I love to discover interesting stories from seemingly noisy and unrelated data and I love to play at everyone’s backyard by collaborating with biologists and doctors to improve human well being through quantitative reasoning on data.

Who are the instrumental women in your life and why?
My mom. She always believes in me and my choices.