Xiaoli Fern is an associate professor of computer science at Oregon State University. She received her Ph.D. (2005) in computer engineering from Purdue University and her M.S. (2000) and B.S. (1997) degrees from Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Her research interests are in machine learning and data mining, specifically in the area of unsupervised learning, including clustering, correlation analysis, dimension reduction, outlier detection and frequent pattern mining. She is particularly interested in scientific applications of data mining and is an active faculty member of the IGERT Ecosystem Informatics program at OSU.