He is the Brock Family Chair and Georgia Research Alliance (GRA) Eminent Scholar in Nanomedicine in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering,[1] with joint appointments in the School of Chemistry & Biochemistry,[2] the School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering,[3] and Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering & Bioscience at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

degree in chemical physics from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in 1987,[5] he pursued graduate studies at the Fujian Institute of Research on the Structure of Matter until the end of 1990.

[9][10] As an independent researcher, he and his group have made original and important contributions to the following areas: colloidal crystals and their photonic applications,[11] colloidal assembly,[12] one-dimensional nanostructures,[13] electrospinning and alignment of nanofibers,[14] electrospun nanofibers as scaffolds for tissue engineering,[15] and shape-controlled synthesis of colloidal nanocrystals and their applications in plasmonics, spectroscopy, heterogeneous catalysis, and electrocatalysis,[16] invention of silver nanostructures with many different morphologies such as nanowires and nanocubes,[17] and invention of gold nanocages and exploration of their biomedical applications.

He has served or is serving on the Advisory Boards of Advanced Healthcare Materials (2011-, Chairman of the International advisory board),[21] Nano Letters (2020–), Chemical Reviews (2019–),[22] BME Frontiers (2019–), Research (2018–), ACS Applied Nano Materials (2018–),[23] Small Methods (2017–),[24] ChemNanoMat (2015–),[25] Chemical Physics Letters (2014-),[26] Chinese Journal of Chemistry (2014–),[27] Chemistry: A European Journal (2014–),[28] Cancer Nanotechnology (2014-),[29] Particle & Particle Systems Characterization (2013–),[30] Angewandte Chemie International Edition (2011–),[31] Chemistry: An Asian Journal (2010–),[32] Accounts of Chemical Research (2010–2016), Journal of Biomedical Optics (2010–2014), Science of Advanced Materials (2009–), Nano Research (2008–),[33] Nano Today (2006–),[34] Langmuir (2005–2010, 2013–2015), Chemistry of Materials (2005–2007), International Journal of Nanotechnology (2003–),[35] and Advanced Functional Materials (2001–),[36] World Scientific Series in Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (2009–, World Scientific Publishers),[37] Dekker Encyclopedia of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (2001, Marcel Dekker Inc.).

Xia was named by Times Higher Education one of the Top 10 chemists (#5) in the world from 1999-2009 based on the number of citations per paper.