Bowei Xi received her PhD in Statistics from the Department of Statistics at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 2004. She is an associate professor in the Department of Statistics at Purdue University. She was a visiting faculty member in the Department of Statistics at Stanford University in Summer 2007, and a visiting faculty member at the Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute (SAMSI) from September 2012 to May 2013.

Her research focuses on multidisciplinary work involving big datasets with complex structures from very different application areas including cyber security, Internet traffic, metabolomics, machine learning, and data mining. She has a US patent on an automatic system configuration tool and has filed another patent application for the identification of blood-based metabolite biomarkers of pancreatic cancer. She also participates in the development of a novel software environment, DeltaRho.org, which allows analysts to carry out deep analysis of complex big datasets wholly within R.