Ningrui Xie grew up in Beijing, China. After high school, she came to Canada to study biology and mathematics at McMaster University. During the first semester of her freshman year, she worked in the lab led by Yang Qing at Beijing Forestry University, where she developed a keen interest in biostatistics and computer science. In the meantime, she worked as an intern at Versailles Group, Ltd, where she was in charge of processing client data from different companies. During the summer of her second year, she obtained an internship at IRIC with Dr. Sébastien Lemieux. During this internship, she developed a neural network approach to characterize the trios of small molecules, genes, and cell lines. In addition to biostatistics and computer science, Ningrui was also interested in astrophysics and skydiving.

Ningrui was an undergraduate intern.