Xiao-Chuan CaiX.-C. Cai's research interests are in the general area of scientific and engineering computing including parallel algorithms and high performance software for linear and nonlinear partial differential equations, domain decomposition methods, multigrid methods, numerical linear algebra, PDE constrained optimizations, inverse problems, stochastic partial differential equations, computational fluid dynamics, fluid-structure interactions, computational biomechanics, and parallel processing.

He received his BSc degree in 1984 from Peking University, his MSc in 1988 and PhD in 1989 from Courant Institute, New York University. He was a postdoc during 1989-1990 in the Department of Computer Science, Yale University. During 1990-1993, he held the position of an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics, University of Kentucky. Since 1993, he has been a faculty member in the Department of Computer Science, University of Colorado Boulder, and the positions he held include Assistant Professor (1993-1997), Associate Professor (1997-2004), Professor (2004-present), Director of Graduate Studies (2002-2007) and Department Chair (2007-2011). He is also an affiliated faculty member in the Department of Applied Mathematics, University of Colorado Boulder (1993-present). He is a SIAM Fellow.