Yufang Cai was born in Huining, Gansu Province, China, in 1974. She received the B.S. degree in mathematics education from the Northwest Normal University,Gansu Province, China, in 1998, and the M.S. degrees in Pattern Recognition & Intelligent Systems  from Chongqing University, Chongqing, China, in 2002, respectively.

Since 2002, she has been working in the ICT research center of Chongqing University, where she was an Assistant Professor in 2003, became an Associate Professor in 2014. She mainly engaged in computer tomography (CT) technology, industrial CT data correction, image reconstruction, pattern recognition and image processing.

She presided over 2 national projects and 2 general horizontal projects. She has published 15 EI-indexed papers, been granted 10 invention patents and formulated 10 national standards, won one first-prize of Chongqing Science and Technology Progress in 2014,and one third-prize of Army Science and Technology Progress in 2007.