Mengfan Xu

Hi! I am Mengfan, and I am a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering and an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Manning College of Information & Computer Sciences at UMass Amherst.

I obtained my Ph.D. from the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences at Northwestern University in 2024, where I was very fortunate and grateful to be advised by Prof. Diego Klabjan and to receive invaluable mentorship from the faculty members, a debt of gratitude I can never fully repay. Previously, I obtained my bachelor’s degree in Statistics from the University of Science and Technology of China in 2018, where I was very appreciative to receive mathematical training and be admitted to a summer exchange program in Biostatistics at the Yale School of Public Health and the Yale School of Medicine in 2017, an experience that opened many doors for me.

My research group works at the intersection of operations research, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, with a particular emphasis on online learning. We formulate real-time decision-making problems in an imperfect and complex world and develop principled algorithms with provable and generalizable guarantees for these challenging settings. Motivated by operational challenges faced by real-world decision-makers, our work develops new methodologies that capture the intricate structures and complexities underlying these problems, with applications across a broad range of domains. Our research interests include:

• Online Learning
• Multi-Agent Systems
• Statistical Learning and Algorithm Design
• Stochastic Processes and Simulation Optimization
• Applications in Operations Research