Heng Xu
- Professor
- IT, Analytics, and Operations
Biography
Dr. Heng Xu is a Professor of Information Technology, Analytics, and Operations at the Mendoza College of Business, University of Notre Dame. Before joining Notre Dame, she held tenured faculty appointments at Penn State, American University, and the University of Florida, and served for three years as a Program Director at the National Science Foundation (NSF).
Her research spans information privacy, data analytics, and AI ethics. She has received numerous honors for scholarly contributions across disciplines, including the USEC Test of Time Award (Symposium on Usable Security and Privacy, USEC 2026), Jeanneret Award for Excellence in the Study of Individual or Group Assessment (Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, SIOP 2025), Best Article Award (Personnel Psychology, 2025), Social Justice Best Paper Award (INFORMS Information Systems Society, 2024), Davis-Dickson Impact Award (MIS Quarterly, 2021), Stafford Beer Medal (Operational Research Society, 2018), and the NSF CAREER Award (National Science Foundation, 2010), among others. Her work appears in top outlets across business, computer science, law and psychology, including Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), Information Systems Research, Management Science, MIS Quarterly, Psychological Methods, Psychometrika, Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), and the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law. Her research and education have been supported by over $8 million in competitive funding from the Army Research Institute, DARPA, NIH, NSF, NSA, as well as industry sponsors such as Meta and Amazon.
Dr. Xu has also contributed to several national research initiatives, serving on the National Privacy Research Strategy Working Group (2014-2016) and co-chairing the Federal Privacy R&D Interagency Working Group (2016), which developed the White House's 2016 National Privacy Research Strategy. In addition, she served on the National Academies' Committee on Toward an Open Science Enterprise (2017-2018), which produced the consensus study report titled Open Science by Design: Realizing a Vision for 21st Century Research.
Dr. Xu currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems, and a Department Editor for IEEE Security & Privacy.