1. Tell us about your basic background? Where did you come from, former education, former jobs.

Before starting my graduate study at UIUC, I obtained my bachelor’s degree from China Agricultural University and the University of Maryland, College Park, focusing on agricultural economics and statistics. 

2. What was the research you performed while at OFOR?

At OFOR, I worked on three projects: 1) exploring the pass-through impacts of the Low Carbon Fuel Standard credit costs to California wholesale gasoline and diesel; 2) building up yield forecasting models for major crops and providing metrics to measure the accuracy and computational efficiency of selected models; 3) applying the cross-quantilogram method to examine, in the grain futures market, if the extreme commodity index traders position changes Granger-cause the significant movements in futures returns. 

3. Where are you currently working? What are your main responsibilities?

I work at Bayer Crop Science as a Statistician in the Breeding Organization. My main responsibilities are: 1) provide statistical analysis to the major row crop pipelines; 2) develop statistical power analysis applications to help with the experiment design and optimize cost/benefit for the organization; 3) build forecasting models using machine learning/statistical learning tools. 

4. How did OFOR contribute to your development as a scientist and as a person?

OFOR gave me invaluable training and resources to become an agricultural economist. I enjoyed the graduate program weekly seminars (ACE527 and ACE528) where students and faculty discuss state-of-the-art research topics and methodologies. Faculty members are very professional and have extensive knowledge covering multiple aspects of agricultural economics. Their open-door policy gave me the opportunity to hold extensive talks with them and helped me broaden my horizons and have more in-depth thinking on commodity markets and methodologies for price analysis. OFOR makes available high frequency trading data to the students, which allowed me to learn how to handle, visualize and model big datasets.

5 .What is one memory about OFOR you carried with you?

The most memorable experience for me was the field trip to CME organized by Prof. Irwin. We got to visit the trading floor and had some round-table discussions with colleagues from CME, who shared many details about transaction matching algorithms and mechanisms and the transition to electronic platforms. It was very interesting to see the virtually empty trading floors, as traders had been displaced by machine trading.