Lily Xu

Lily Xu is a postdoc at the University of Oxford with the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery and incoming assistant professor at Columbia University. Her research develops AI methods across machine learning, optimization, and causal inference for planetary health challenges. She aims 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 nongovernmental organizations and interdisciplinary researchers to bridge research and practice, serving as AI Lead for the SMART Partnership to support wildlife conservation through poaching prevention. 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 her research has been recognized with best paper runner-up at AAAI, the INFORMS Doing Good with Good OR award, a Google PhD Fellowship, and a Siebel Scholarship.