Ying Xu

Ying Xu is an assistant professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Her research focuses on designing AI technologies that promote language and literacy development, STEM learning, and wellbeing for children and families.

Xu’s current projects investigate the design and effectiveness of conversational AI technologies to serve as language partners and learning companions for children, and how AI affects children’s social interactions and developmental processes. Additionally, she explores human-AI collaborative approaches to empower education stakeholders to engage in the development of AI technologies for their specific needs and contexts.

Xu collaborates closely with children, families, educators, and community organizations to create media that is informed by and reflective of their values, practices, and linguistic and cultural assets. She partners with major organizations such as PBS KIDS, GBH Education, and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop. Her research is funded by the National Science Foundation, Schmidt Futures, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Her work has been published in leading academic journals across psychology, education, and human-computer interaction, including Child Development Perspectives, Journal of Educational Psychology, Child Development, Computers & Education, and the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. She has received numerous best paper awards and is acknowledged as an Early Career Interdisciplinary Scholar by the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD).

Xu completed her Ph.D. training in language, literacy, and technology at the University of California, Irvine, and was an assistant professor of learning sciences and technology at the University of Michigan from 2022 until she moved to Harvard in 2024.