Celebrating Women’s History Month: Spotlight on Professor Xin Guo and Her Research Group
March is Women’s History Month, a time to recognize and celebrate the achievements of women in our community and around the world. Berkeley Engineering has always been a leader in breaking barriers for women, and the Department of Industrial Engineering & Operations Research takes great pride in leading the college in gender diversity, with over 50% of students self-identifying as women or non-binary.
In honor of Women’s History Month, the department is proud to highlight the outstanding achievements of one of our professors, Xin Guo, Head Undergraduate Advisor and the Coleman Fung Chair in Financial Modeling. Today, Xin is co-organizing the 11th Western Conference on Mathematical Finance, which brings together researchers from institutions across the US and Europe working on Financial and Actuarial Mathematics.
Xin’s research has made a tremendous impact on both the scientific community and in industry. For instance, Xin’s paper, Learning Mean Field Games (NeurIPS 2019), introduced a new and general mean-field game framework for simultaneous learning and decision-making in stochastic games with large populations. Xin’s paper has significant implications for multi-agent reinforcement learning, and in 2022, IMSI invited Xin to lead Machine Learning and Mean-Field Games, a four-day workshop that took place during the 2022 Decision Making and Uncertainty Conference Program. Meanwhile, Xin develops innovative forecasting techniques for the transportation industry in her role as Amazon scholar, contributing to well above 55 million dollars projected annual savings for Amazon.
Xin Guo’s student, Renyuan Xu (PhD IEOR ‘19), has worked closely with Xin over the years, co-authoring Learning Mean-Field Games and presenting her research during the Machine Learning and Mean-Field Games workshop. Renyuan was recently awarded the SIAM FE early career award for her exceptional contributions to the mathematical modeling of financial markets. Renyuan is also participating in today’s conference on mathematical finance.
In addition to Renyuan’s fantastic news, we also celebrate the recent successes of two more of Professor Guo’s students. Haoyang Cindy Cao (PhD IEOR ‘20) recently accepted a tenure-track position at John Hopkins University, and Anran Hu (PhD IEOR ‘22 and another co-author of Learning Mean-Field Games), who was previously a research fellow at Oxford University, will join Columbia University as a tenure-track faculty member. Additionally, Xinyu Li, an IEOR student who helped develop the forecast models for Amazon got a return internship offer. We are thrilled to see Xin Guo’s students thriving!
Xin Guo is not alone in paving the way for women in Berkeley’s Industrial Engineering and Operations Research (IEOR) field. She is joined by other accomplished women faculty such as Professor Dorit Hochbaum, the first female faculty member of Berkeley IEOR, Professor Candi Yano, the first female department chair in the College of Engineering, and Professor Rhonda Righter, a respected academic and admired mentor. Together, these exceptional women have made significant contributions to the IEOR department and have inspired countless future generations of female engineers.