Bai was educated at the University of Science and Technology of China, Beijing from 1963-68 and Hefei, Anhui, China where he obtained his PhD in 1982. He is professor of statistics in the department of statistics at the Northeast Normal University, China. He was previously: Research associate of the Center for Multivariate Analysis, University of Pittsburgh; senior research associate at the Center for Multivariate Analysis at Penn State University; associate professor, department of statistics, Temple University, Philadelphia; professor of statistics, department of applied mathematics, National Sun Yat-sen University, Taiwan, China; senior fellow and professor of statistics, department of mathematics and department of statistics and applied probability, National University of Singapore.

Xie (PhD, 1996, University of Science and Technology of China) is now a Principal Investigator of Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at the Microscale and a full professor of the Department of Chemistry, University of Science and Technology of China. She was appointed as the Cheung Kong Scholar Professor of inorganic chemistry in 2000 and elected as a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2013. She is also a recipient of many awards, including the National Prize for Natural Sciences of China (2001 and 2012), China Young Scientist Award (2002), China Young Female Scientist Award (2006) and IUPAC Distinguished Women in Chemistry/Chemical Engineering Award (2013), TWAS Prize in Chemistry (2014) and L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science (2015).