Bo Li (statistician)

Bo Li is a Chinese-American statistician whose research focuses on spatial statistics, spatio-temporal statistics, geostatistics, and environmental statistics, with applications in paleoclimatology, estimation of crop yields, and agriculture-related cancer risks. She is Marjorie Roberts Professor of statistics and chair of the Department of Statistics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and a professor in the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.

She should not be confused with another Bo Li, a machine learning researcher and assistant professor of computer science at the same university.

Education and career
Li studied naval architecture, ocean engineering, fluid mechanics, and industrial foreign trade at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China, earning bachelor's and master's degrees there. She went to Texas A&M University for graduate study in statistics. She earned a second master's degree in 2004, and completed her Ph.D. in 2006 under the joint supervision of Raymond J. Carroll and Michael Sherman.

After completing her Ph.D., she was a postdoctoral researcher at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and then from 2008 to 2013 an assistant professor of statistics at Purdue University. She moved to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2013. She was named as a Data Science Founder Professorial Scholar in 2019, and was given the Marjorie Roberts Professorship in 2023.

She is 2023 chair of the American Statistical Association Section on Statistics and Environment, and serves on the Advisory Committee on Environmental Research and Education of the National Science Foundation Office of Integrative Activities.

Recognition
Li was named as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association in 2019. She was the 2020 recipient of the H.O. Hartley Award, given by the Texas A&M University to a former student for distinguished service to statistics. The American Statistical Association Section on Statistics and Environment gave her their Distinguished Achievement Award in 2022.