Professor Cui, the son of medical doctors, grew up in China. His parents encouraged him to pursue a career outside of medicine so that he wouldn't have to "work nights".
He chose actuarial science. As an undergraduate in Hong Kong, he lived in a residence that featured a "high table", similar to the one depicted in the Great Hall of Hogwarts Castle in the Harry Potter series. There he heard many famous speakers.
Professor Cui credits a professor from HKU with encouraging him to enter academia. It was in Canada during graduate school that Professor Cui discovered how much he enjoyed research - not to mention snowboarding.
After leaving the cold Northern climate, he found there was much to capture his interest in the New York metropolitan area. He has become a film buff and an avid theater-goer who sees almost every musical on Broadway. His research also appeared in the radar of practitioners, and his latest work on Markov chain approximations appears in Wilmott magazine (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/wilm.10778).
As rewarding as he finds teaching, there’s one other career that might have been his calling: Film director. Watch out Martin Scorsese!