About Me

Yuqian Xu is an Associate Professor (with tenure) of Operations Management at the Kenan-Flagler Business School, University of North Carolina (UNC), Chapel Hill. Her research studies operations in digital platforms and financial services, with a particular focus on (i) human-AI interactions, (ii) emerging technologies in digital platform operations, and (ii) operational risk management. 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, Watsi, Weee!, and Bank of China. Through these collaborations, she explores practice-driven research problems by utilizing methods such as generative (diffusion) models, econometric models, machine learning, deep learning, and stochastic models and stochastic control 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 covered by major media outlets such as The Economist, NPR Weekend Radio, TIME Magazine, Forbes, USA Today, NBC News, ABC News, MarketWatch, and Yahoo Finance. 

Her research has been published in journals including Management Science, Operations Research, Manufacturing and Service Operations Management, Information Systems Research, Production and Operations Management, etc. 

She serves as Associate Editor of Operations Research, Service Science, Senior Editor of Production and Operations Management, and Department Editor of Decision Sciences Journal. 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) from NYU Stern School of Business with the Herman E. Krooss Dissertation Award.