Ning studied statistics at the University of Science and Technology of China, earning a bachelor's degree in 1999 and a master's degree in 2002. She completed a Ph.D. in biostatistics at Johns Hopkins University in 2007.[1] Her dissertation, Estimating causal treatment effects for post-randomization marker data with failure event censoring, was supervised by Mei-Cheng Wang.[2]
She joined the MD Anderson Cancer Center as a postdoctoral researcher from 2007 to 2009,[1] and was an assistant professor in the UTHealth School of Public Health of the University of Texas from 2009 to 2011 before returning to the MD Anderson Cancer Center as a faculty member.[3]