Lily Xu

Lily Xu is Sun-Wu Assistant Professor at Columbia University in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research. She directs the caPP Lab which advances computation and algorithms for People and the Planet. Her group develops new methods across machine learning and optimization to enable practitioners to make effective decisions in the face of limited data, taking actions that are robust to uncertainty, effective at scale, and future-looking. She partners closely with NGOs and interdisciplinary researchers to bridge research and practice, serving as AI Lead for the SMART Partnership for wildlife conservation and Scientific Advisor to INVERSA for invasive species management. Since 2020, she co-organizes the EAAMO research initiative, committed to advancing Equity and Access in Algorithms, Mechanisms, and Optimization.

Lily holds a PhD in computer science from Harvard University and was a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Oxford with the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery. Her research has been recognized with best paper runner-up at AAAI, the INFORMS Doing Good with Good OR award, a Google PhD Fellowship, a Siebel Scholarship, and AAMAS best dissertation runner-up.