I am an Assistant Professor in the Division of Biostatistics and Health Data Science at the University of Minnesota.

I obtained my PhD in Biostatistics from Johns Hopkins University in 2023. My PhD advisor is Ciprian Crainiceanu. Before that, I obtained my Bachelor's in Statistics from Zhejiang University in 2018.

Inspired by the complex data structures from large cohort studies such as UK Biobank or NHANES, my statistical research focuses on developing Functional Data Analysis methods and accompanying scalable and reproducible software. 

A major direction of my scientific research is to quantify the role of objectively measured physical activity collected from wearable devices on aging, disease progression, and mortality. 

Selected Publications

• Jiang Z, Crainiceanu CM, Cui E (2025). Tutorial on Bayesian Functional Regression Using Stan. Statistics in Medicine, 44(20-22), e70265.

• Paul B, Reiss PT, Cui E, Foà N (2025). Continuous-Time Multivariate Analysis. Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics, 34(1), 384-394.

  • R package: ctmva.

• Leroux A*, Cui E*, Smirnova E, Muschelli J, Schrack JA, Crainiceanu CM (2024). NHANES 2011-2014: Objective Physical Activity is the Strongest Predictor of All-cause Mortality. Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, 56(10), 1926-1934.

  • Featured article. Media Coverage.

• Crainiceanu CM, Goldsmith J, Leroux A, Cui E (2024). Functional Data Analysis with R. Chapman & Hall/CRC Statistics.

• Cui E, Li R, Crainiceanu CM, Xiao L (2023). Fast Multilevel Functional Principal Component Analysis. Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics, 32(2), 366-377. 

  • R software: refund::mfpca.face().

• Cui E, Leroux A, Smirnova E, Crainiceanu CM (2022). Fast Univariate Inference for Longitudinal Functional Models. Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics, 31(1), 219-230.

  • R package: fastFMM.

• Cui E, Crainiceanu CM, Leroux A (2021). Additive Functional Cox Model. Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics, 30(3), 780-793.

  • R software: vignette.

A complete list can be found on Google Scholar.