[1] Xu graduated from Smith College in 1996, with a bachelor's degree in computer science.
[1] She credits going to a women's college with the nurturing environment that allowed her to become interested in computer science.
[1] Her dissertation, Incremental Algorithms for the Design of Triangular-Based Spline Surfaces, was supervised by Jean Gallier.
[3] After staying at Pennsylvania as a postdoctoral researcher, she joined the Bryn Mawr faculty in 2004.
With Jean Gallier, she is the author of A Guide to the Classification Theorem for Compact Surfaces (Springer, 2013).