I am a Chinese American statistician focusing on Bayesian statistical inference, statistical machine learning, and computational biology. I was an Assistant Professor of Statistics at Harvard University from 1991 to 1994. From 1994 to 2004, I held positions as Assistant, Associate, and Full Professor of Statistics (promoted while on leave) at Stanford University. Since 2000, I have been a Professor of Statistics in the Department of Statistics at Harvard University, and I also hold a courtesy appointment at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

I have written numerous research papers and a book on Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms, including their applications in biology. I am also a co-author of several early software tools for biological sequence motif discovery, such as MACAW, Gibbs Motif Sampler, BioProspector, Motif Regressor, MDScan, and Tmod. In the realm of genetic data analysis, I have contributed to software like BLADE, HAPLOTYPER, PL-EM, and BEAM. More recently, my work has extended to genome structure, gene expression, and cell type analysis, resulting in tools like HiCNorm, BACH, CLIME, RABIT, CLIC, TIMER, and PhyloAcc.

I was honoured to be an Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS) Medallion Lecturer in 2002 and a Bernoulli Lecturer in 2004. I was elected a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in 2004, a Fellow of the American Statistical Association in 2005, and a Fellow of the International Society for Computational Biology in 2022.