Prof. Xu is Professor of Management Science and Supply Chain Management at Pennsylvania State University. She currently serves as the Director of the PhD Program in Smeal College of Business. She served as the Chair of the Intercollegiate Dual-Title Degree Graduate Program in Operations Research at Penn State from 1998-2007. Prof. Xu’s primary research interests are centered on design, performance evaluation, simulation and optimization of stochastic operating systems and their applications in supply chain management and service systems, telecommunication, information technology, and reliability. In particular, she is interested in production and inventory systems, risk management of supply chain, revenue management, queuing control, stochastic ordering of multivariate stochastic processes, maintenance policies and risk analysis in reliability systems. Prof. Xu has published widely in leading academic journals, including Management Science, Operations Research, Mathematics of Operations Research, Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, Production and Operations Management, among others. Her research is currently supported by NSF grants CMMI-0825960 and CMMI-1000183 and the Competitive Research Program in Smeal College of Business. She has served as an Associate Editor and an editorial board member in several academic journals. She has also held visiting positions in several institutions in the US and abroad.