T. Tony Cai


Tianwen Tony Cai is a Chinese statistician. He is the Daniel H. Silberberg Professor of Statistics and Vice Dean at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He is also professor of Applied Math & Computational Science Graduate Group, and associate scholar at the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology & Informatics, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania. In 2008 Tony Cai was awarded the COPSS Presidents' Award.

Early life and education

Cai was born in Rui'an, Wenzhou, Zhejiang, China. In 1986, he graduated from the Department of Mathematics, Hangzhou University, at 18 years old. In 1989, he then received an M.Sc. from Shanghai Jiao Tong University and in 1996, earned a PhD from Cornell University

Career

Tony Cai was appointed the Dorothy Silberberg Professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania from July 1, 2007 to July 31, 2018 and has been the Daniel H. Silberberg Professor at Wharton since August 1, 2018. Cai has been the Vice Dean of the Wharton School since August 1, 2017.
Tony Cai's research focuses on high-dimensional statistics, statistical machine learning, large-scale inference, nonparametric function estimation, functional data analysis, and statistical decision theory, and applications to genomics, compressed sensing, chemical identification, medical imaging, and financial engineering.
Tony Cai was elected a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in 2006.
In 2008, he received the COPSS Presidents’ Award from the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies.
In 2009, Tony Cai was named the Medallion Lecturer at the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.
In 2017, he was elected to the presidency of International Chinese Statistical Association.

Additional affiliations and memberships

Tony Cai was a co-editor of the leading statistics journal, the Annals of Statistics from 2010 to 2012. He has also served on editorial boards of several other journals, including Journal of the American Statistical Association, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B, Statistics Surveys, and Statistica Sinica.

Honors and awards

Cai has four brothers and one sister. His sister Tianxi Cai is the John Rock Professor of Population and Translational Data Sciences in the Department of Biostatistics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She is also a professor at Harvard Medical School. Topics in her research include biomarkers, personalized medicine, survival analysis, and health informatics. His brother Tianwu Michael Cai, majored in physics is a vice-president of Goldman Sachs. Tony Cai has two children, a son and daughter.