Wenfei Xu earned a PhD in urban planning at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University and completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Mansueto Institute and the Center for Spatial Data Science with affiliation at the University of Chicago Department of Sociology. Her research topics include social-spatial stratification, segregation, race and ethnicity, computational methods, and neighborhood change in the United States. Her work ranges from an interest in the historical legacies of structural housing discrimination and its contemporary spatial-temporal manifestations to exploring the uses of big data in characterizing human activity for urban social science research. She holds dual Masters in Urban Planning and Architecture from MIT and a BA in Economics from the University of Chicago.