Ning Cai is currently professor and thrust head of the Thrust of Financial Technology at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) (HKUST(GZ)). He is also serving as the director of the Guangzhou Municipal Key Laboratory of Financial Technology Cutting-Edge Research. Previously, he taught in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Decision Analytics (IEDA) at HKUST as assistant professor, associate professor, and professor sequentially. 

He was the first Academic Director of the Master of Science Program in Financial Technology (MSc in FinTech) at HKUST, which is jointly offered by School of Business and Management, School of Engineering, and School of Science. He also served as the Director of the Financial Engineering and FinTech Laboratory in the Department of IEDA at HKUST. He received both MS and PhD in operations research in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at Columbia University and both BS and MS in probability and statistics in the School of Mathematical Sciences at Peking University. 

His research interests include FinTech, financial engineering, risk management, and green finance. He is also interested in conducting research in operations research, stochastic modeling, applied probability, and statistics/data science, both methodologically and in their broad industrial and financial applications. He has published papers in top-tier scholarly journals, such as Management Science, Operations Research, Mathematics of Operations Research, Mathematical Finance, and INFORMS Journal on Computing. He received the Research Award of the “Teachers of the Year” in 2023 at HKUST(GZ), the Teaching Excellence Appreciation Award of 2010-11 in the School of Engineering at HKUST, and Honorable Mention of the George E. Nicholson Student Paper Competition in the INFORMS Annual Meeting 2008.

He is currently serving as Area Editor of Financial Engineering Area of Operations Research Letters and Associate Editor/Editorial Board Member of other academic journals, such as Digital Finance and Stochastic Models. He served as Associate Editor of Operations Research from 2015 to 2023 and Guest Associate Editor of Management Science in 2015.