Lily Xu is Sun-Wu Assistant Professor at Columbia University in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research. Her research develops AI methods across machine learning, optimization, and causal inference for planetary health challenges, with a focus on biodiversity conservation. She aims to design novel algorithms 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. 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.
