About Me

Yuqian Xu is an assistant professor of Operations Management at Kenan-Flagler Business School, University of North Carolina (UNC), Chapel Hill. Her research studies operations in financial services and digital platforms, with a particular focus on (i) operational risk management and (ii) user behaviors and emerging technologies in digital platform operations. To develop a deeper intuition into these issues involved in real-world operations management (OM) problems, she has been collaborating with different companies, including JD.com, Alibaba, Instacart, and Bank of China. Through these collaborations, she explores practice-driven research problems by utilizing methods such as stochastic models, econometric models, machine learning, and deep learning, to derive managerial implications and propose implementable solutions and algorithms. Her recent projects on the design of voice chatbots have been implemented by leading digital platforms. She has given talks at different academic, industry, and government conferences and organizations, such as the Federal Reserve Bank and the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission.

Her research has been published in journals including Management Science, Operations Research, Information Systems Research, Production and Operations Management, etc. She serves as a senior editor of the Production and Operations Management Journal and an associate editor of Service Science. She has also served as an editorial member of the Journal of Probability in the Engineering and Informational Sciences (2018-2022).

She has a B.S. in Mathematics from the Kuang Yaming Honors School of Intensive Instruction in Science and Arts at Nanjing University, China. She received her Ph.D. degree (Beta Gamma Sigma) in 2017 from NYU Stern School of Business with the Herman E. Krooss Dissertation Award.