Bio

Xian Yu is currently an Assistant Professor of Integrated Systems Engineering at The Ohio State University. She received her Ph.D. degree in Operations Research from the University of Michigan in 2022 and B.S. degree in Mathematics and Applied Mathematics from Xi’an Jiaotong University in 2017. Her research interest lies in sequential decision-making and optimization under uncertainty, with applications in transportation, logistics and supply chain management. Her work aims to bridge theories in stochastic integer programming, distributionally robust optimization, and dynamic programming, as well as to develop efficient algorithms for solving large-scale complex optimization problems. Xian is the recipient of several awards, including the first place of IISE Pritsker Doctoral Dissertation Award in 2023, IOE Murty Prize for the Best Student Research Paper on Optimization in 2021, and Michigan Institute for Computational Discovery and Engineering Fellowship in 2019. Specifically, her research focuses on

Methodologies:

• • Stochastic Programming
  • Distributionally Robust Optimization
  • Dynamic Programming
  • Reinforcement Learning

Applications:

• • Smart Transportation and Logistics
  • Supply Chain Management

Honors and Awards

• NSF Award on “Collaborative Research: SLES: Safe Distributional-Reinforcement Learning-Enabled Systems: Theories, Algorithms and Experiments“, 2023 [News]

• First Place in IISE Pritsker Doctoral Dissertation Award, 2023 [News]

• Katta Murty Prize for the Best Research Paper on Optimization, 2021

• Michigan Institute for Computational Discovery and Engineering (MICDE) Fellowship, University of Michigan, 2019

• Travel Grant for Ph.D. Workshop on Transportation and Logistics Challenges and Opportunities, 2019

• Mixed Integer Programming Workshop Student Travel Award, 2019

• Rackham Travel Grant, University of Michigan, 2018-2021

• Deans and Engineering Graduate Fellowships, University of Michigan, 2017

Education

• Ph.D. in Operations Research, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2017 – 2022

• B.S. in Mathematics and Applied Mathematics (Honors Science Program), Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, China, 2013 – 2017

  • Special Class for the Gifted Young, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, China, 2011 – 2013

• Visiting Student in the Department of Mathematics, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, 2016