Xiaochun Niu

Xiaochun (Nora) Niu

xiaochun.niu@duke.eduCVGoogle ScholarLinkedIn

I am a postdoctoral researcher in Decision Sciences at the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University, working with Prof. Jiaming Xu. I received my Ph.D. from Northwestern University’s Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences, where I was advised by Prof. Ermin Wei and Prof. Julia Gaudio, and my B.S. in Mathematics from Nanjing University.

I am on the academic job market this year (2026-2027).

Xiaochun (Nora) Niu, postdoctoral researcher at Duke University

Research interests

My research interests lie at the intersection of operations research, machine learning, and network science. I advance theoretical understanding and develop efficient methods for learning and decision-making in large-scale stochastic and networked systems. My recent work has explored sparse network design, community detection and matching in random geometric graphs, and multi-agent and multi-source learning, with applications in business, engineering, and the natural sciences.

Publications

Journal papers and preprints

  2. Optimality of Random Regular Graphs in Sparse Network Designs

    Weijia Li, Xiaochun Niu, Yehua Wei, Jiaming Xu

    Major revision at Operations Research, 2026

    Twenty-Seventh ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC 2026)

    Oral presentation at INFORMS Manufacturing and Service Operations Management (MSOM) Annual Conference 2026

  3. Learning with Shared Representations: Statistical Rates and Efficient Algorithms

    Xiaochun Niu, Lili Su, Jiaming Xu, Pengkun Yang

    Accepted for publication conditioned on minor revisions at Journal of Machine Learning Research, 2026

    Oral presentation at International Workshop on Federated Foundation Models in conjunction with NeurIPS 2024 (FL@FM-NeurIPS 2024)

    Oral presentation at INFORMS Workshop on Data Science 2026

Conference papers