Jason Xu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Statistical Science at Duke University, with a secondary appointment in Biostatistics and Bioinformatics. Prior to joining the faculty at Duke, he was an NSF Mathematical Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of California Los Angeles. He attended the University of Washington as an NDSEG Fellow and holds a PhD in Statistics, supervised by Vladimir Minin. Jason's research interests focus on long-standing computational challenges in statistical inference, and include stochastic process models of epidemic and biological data, EM and MM algorithms for clustering and related non-convex optimization tasks, and algorithms for inference algorithms under structural constraints.