Rate My Professor Aihua Xia

Professor Aihua Xia is a Professor in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Melbourne. She obtained her Bachelor of Science in Mathematics from East China Normal University in 1986, Master of Science in Stochastic Processes from the same institution in 1988, and PhD in Applied Probability from the University of Melbourne in 1995. Her academic career includes positions as Probationary Lecturer and Lecturer at the Department of Statistics, East China Normal University (1988-1991), Lecturer at the Department of Statistics, University of New South Wales (1995-2000), Senior Lecturer (2001-2002), Associate Professor (2002-2015), and Professor since 2016 at the Department/School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Melbourne.

Professor Xia's research interests encompass point processes, limit theory of random processes, applied probability and Stein's method, Markov processes, queueing networks, and image processing. She is a member of the Stochastic Processes research group, focusing on limit theory in stochastic processes, Markov processes, point processes, and Poisson approximations. Notable publications include “The saturated pairwise interaction Gibbs point process as a joint species distribution model” with Flint et al. in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series C (2022), “Palm theory, random measures and Stein couplings” with Chen and Röllin in the Annals of Applied Probability (2021), “Difference in distribution functions: a new diffusion weighted imaging metric for estimating white matter integrity” with Du et al. in NeuroImage (2021), “Geometric sums, size biasing and zero biasing” with Liu in Electronic Communications in Probability (2022), and “When is the Conway-Maxwell-Poisson distribution infinitely divisible?” with Geng in Statistics & Probability Letters (2022). Professor Xia has been awarded the Moran Medal by the Australian Academy of Science in 2001, elected as a member of the International Statistical Institute in 2010, and named a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in 2018 for innovative and impactful contributions to stochastic approximations via new couplings. She has secured multiple ARC Discovery Project grants spanning 2012 to 2024.