Miscellaneous

Awards and Honors

  • Finalist, INFORMS RMP Jeff McGill Student Paper Award, 2022
  • MIT IDSS Teaching Assistant of the Year Award, 2021-2022
  • Second Place, Post-Pandemic Supply Chain and Healthcare Management Best Paper Award, 2021
  • Finalist, IBM Service Science Best Student Paper Award, 2021
  • Honorable Mention, INFORMS George Nicholson Student Paper Competition, 2020
  • Winner, INFORMS Data Mining Best Theoretical Paper Award, 2020
  • Finalist, Applied Probability Society Best Student Paper Award, 2019
  • Finalist, INFORMS Undergraduate Operations Research Prize, 2018
  • MIT Presidential Fellowship, MIT, 2018
  • Distinguished Undergraduate Thesis Award, Tsinghua University, 2018
  • Outstanding Graduate of Beijing, 2018
  • Outstanding Graduate of Tsinghua University, 2018
  • National Southwest Associated University Scholarship, Tsinghua University, 2017
  • Tang Lixin Scholarship, Tsinghua University, 2017
  • December Ninth Scholarship, Tsinghua University, 2016
  • Zheng Weimin Scholarship, Tsinghua University, 2016
  • National Scholarship, Chinese Ministry of Education, 2015

 

Twin Brother

My twin brother, Yunbei Xu, was a PhD student at Columbia University. He will be a postdoc at MIT.

 

My Teddy Bear Collection

I love cute teddy bears! As a student I do not own a research group, but I do own a bear group. When professors advise students, I advise teddy bears.

I have collected 30+ teddy bears (of different brands, from different countries in the world) since I was a child. However, I cannot bring all of them with me to MIT, so I started a new collection project after I moved to MIT.

My current collection interest lies in the intersection of "bear-ology" and education. Specifically, I am interested in collecting teddy bears from different universities' bookstores.

Currently I have obtained 14 teddy bears from Berkeley, Columbia (x2), Cornell (x2), Duke, MIT (x2), NYU, Ohio State, Queen's, Stanford, U of Florida and Yale, some of which are gifts from my friends. I put them on my bookshelf, where they are surrounded by some classical math textbooks. I hope that by doing so the bears can learn some "bearable mathematics".

I am always looking for self-motivated cute teddy bears. If you find some cute teddy bears in your school's bookstore, please let me know. I will seriously consider visiting your school and recruiting buying them.

[Update in June 2023: The information in this section is outdated for now.]

 

Hobbies

In my spare time, I enjoy reading literature, playing the violin, listening to music (classical, rock & post rock, jazz, ...), and watching sports games (nearly all kinds of sports).