Xu earned her Ph.D. in Mathematics and a Master’s in Applied Mathematics from UC San Diego, and her Bachelor’s in Math from Nankai University, China.

After a year as Postgraduate Researcher at UC San Diego, she took up Assistant Professorship in Biostatistics at Harvard School of Public Health and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, MA. She returned to UC San Diego in 2004 with a joint appointment from the main campus (Mathematics) and health sciences (Biostatistics and Bioinformatics). Among her academic honors are as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association (ASA), and a recipient of the ASA’s David P. Byar Young Investigator Award. Her current research interests include causal inference, survival analysis, and machine learning methods as applied to biomedicine.