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. Her work provides 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.

Lily received her PhD in computer science from Harvard. 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.