Xiangyu is an Associate Professor at Center for Food Safety, University of Georgia (UGA) and a Guest Researcher in the Enteric Diseases Laboratory Branch, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). He does research in the interdisciplinary areas among microbiology, public health, and agriculture. His research program currently focuses on a data science approach to studying and improving microbial food safety, including genomic epidemiology of foodborne pathogens and agriculture microbiomes.
He chaired the Advanced Molecular Analytics Professional Development Group of the International Association for Food Protection (IAFP). He served on expert advisory or review panels for the industry, US government agencies, World Health Organization, and grant programs in Canada, Belgium, Israel, and China. He also serves as an Editor of Infection, Genetics and Evolution and as an Editorial Board Member of Applied and Environmental Microbiology. He is a recipient of IAFP Larry Beuchat Young Researcher Award, CDC Nakano Citation Award, UGA Creative Research Medal, and American Society for Microbiology/CDC Fellowship.
He authored over 50 scientific publications and book chapters. His scholarly work on data intensive analytics and machine learning applications in food safety has received frequent coverage by academic journals and popular outlets, such as Nature Reviews Microbiology, ProPublica, and The Verge. His laboratory developed SeqSero2, the first computational/genomics method approved to be included in the Food and Drug Administration’s Bacteriological Analytical Manual.
Xiangyu joined the UGA faculty after working at CDC and Kraft Foods. He received a bachelor’s degree in Biotechnology from Shanghai Jiao Tong University and a doctorate in Microbiology from Illinois Institute of Technology.
