Berkeley IEOR Welcomes New Department Chair Professor Xin Guo
We are pleased to announce the appointment of Professor Xin Guo as Chair of the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at UC Berkeley. A Berkeley IEOR faculty member since 2006, Guo is an internationally recognized leader in stochastic processes, stochastic control, and game theory. Her expertise also extends to the theoretical foundations of machine learning, including reinforcement learning, generative models, and transfer learning. Her work bridges mathematics, engineering, and data science to address real-world problems across medicine, finance, and logistics.
Professor Guo has done fundamental research in control and game theory, including mean-field games, and more recently dynamic potential games. She is a frequent plenary and keynote speaker at major stochastic control, financial mathematics and general applied mathematics conferences.
Professor Guo’s research has led to transformative applications. In collaboration with an international team, she developed a machine learning–driven technique to detect early-stage cancer through a simple blood test. This study contributed to an FDA-approved screening method published in Nature Biomedical Engineering. Her algorithm, trained to identify faint traces of tumor DNA amid vast amounts of noisy data, achieved unprecedented sensitivity and specificity in detecting cancer, even in its earliest stages.
As an Amazon Scholar, Professor Guo applies her expertise to Amazon’s transportation systems, where she introduced a novel statistical technique using signature transforms. This innovation has transformed routing and pricing forecasts, contributing to hundreds of millions of dollars in projected savings for the company.
Guo is also a committed mentor and educator. She spearheaded the development of Berkeley IEOR’s FinTech track for UC Berkeley’s Master of Engineering program. This program, the first of its kind in the United States, combines rigorous academic instruction with hands-on industry capstone projects. Her PhD students and postdoctoral fellows have taken up top academic jobs, including Stanford, Columbia, Oxford, and Johns Hopkins Universities.
Professor Guo holds the Coleman Fung Chair in Financial Modeling. She is the co-founder of Women in Financial Engineering journal and serves on the editorial boards of top journals, including Operations Research and Mathematical Finance. Guo has published over 80 research papers and is the author of the book, Quantitative Trading: Algorithms, Analytics, Data, Models, Optimization (Chapman & Hall, 2016). Guo has advised over 40 graduate students, many of whom now work at the forefront of artificial intelligence, finance, and technology. Guo was honored with the UC Chancellor’s Research Award in 2008 for her outstanding contributions to scholarship and education.
As Chair, Professor Guo brings a collaborative ethos, global perspective, and unwavering commitment to advancing UC Berkeley’s excellence in research, teaching, and societal impact. Please join us in congratulating Professor Guo on this well-deserved appointment.
Hear Professor Guo discuss her work as an Amazon Scholar in the video below.