A world-class computational biologist who initiated AI protein structure prediction

Founder of MoleculeMind Inc.

Tenured Full Professor of Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (affiliate of University of Chicago)

Endowed Chair Professor of Tsinghua University

Professor Xu's research focuses on artificial intelligence (AI) and its application in computational biology. He has developed the first AI method RaptorX-Contact that has revolutionized protein structure prediction, on which DeepMind built AlphaFold. AI protein structure prediction has been selected by the Science magazine as one of the top 10 scientific breakthroughs in both 2021 and 2022.

Professor Xu won the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship，NSF Early Career Development Award, PLoS Computational Biology Innovation/Breakthrough Prize，and RECOMB (one of the top two computational biology conferences) Best Poster Award, Best Paper Award and Test-of-Time Award. He has been interviewed many times by prestigious magazines and journals such as The New York Times, The Economist, Fortune, Nature and Science.

Professor Xu was the only representative from mainland China among 50 invited speakers of 2022 Nobel Symposia on “Towards characterizing the human 3D proteome”. He was also the  keynote speaker of the 2021 Future Science Prize, the lecturer of the 2021 Peking University’s College Top Scholar program, the keynote speaker of the 2022 World AI conference and the keynote speaker of the 2022 World Laureates Forum。

Professor Xu was the Senior Fellow of Ilumina Inc and is the associate editor of Bioinformatics，a top journal in the field of bioinformatics. His software RAPTOR/RaptorX has been widely used by academia and industry, and were also licensed by Merck, Genentech and others for protein structure and function prediction. He has published more than 110 papers (cited by more than 12000 times) and developed more than 10 machine learning and bioinformatics software packages