Li Xiong

Timeline

1. 1997–2005

   From USTC to Georgia Tech

   She grows up in Wuhan and earns a bachelor's degree in computer science at the University of Science and Technology of China in 1997. After a master's degree at Johns Hopkins University in 1999 and work as a software engineer until 2001, she completes a Ph.D. in computer science at Georgia Tech in 2005, supervised by Ling Liu.

2. 2005–2012

   Assistant professor at Emory

   She joins Emory University as an assistant professor of mathematics and computer science in 2005. In 2012, she is promoted to associate professor and adds an affiliation with Emory's Department of Biomedical Informatics.

3. 2014–2018

   A PCORI award and promotion

   In August 2014, the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute awards her $1.06 million to build data registries that serve biomedical research while guaranteeing patient privacy; she directs Emory College's Assured Information Management and Sharing (AIMS) lab. She is Winship Distinguished Research Professor from 2015 to 2018 and is promoted to full professor in 2016.

4. 2019

   A federated learning white paper

   In December 2019, she is one of 59 authors of the Google-led white paper Advances and Open Problems in Federated Learning, posted on arXiv. The paper reviews recent advances in federated learning, in which many clients train a model under a central server while the training data stays decentralized, and collects open problems.

5. 2022

   Dobbs Professor and IEEE Fellow

   In September 2022, she is named Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Computer Science at Emory. She is recognized as an IEEE Fellow in 2022 for her contributions to privacy-preserving and secure data sharing and analytics.

6. 2024

   CCS award and AAAS Fellow

   In October 2024, the paper Cross-silo Federated Learning with Record-level Personalized Differential Privacy, which she coauthors, wins a distinguished paper award at ACM CCS; it develops federated learning in which each record can carry its own privacy level. She is also named a 2024 AAAS Fellow, one of seven Emory faculty chosen for the honor.

7. 2025

   ACM Fellow and Geo-Llama award

   In June 2025, her paper Geo-Llama: Leveraging LLMs for Human Mobility Trajectory Generation with Spatiotemporal Constraints receives the Best Student Paper Award at IEEE MDM 2025. She becomes an ACM Fellow in 2025 for contributions to privacy preserving and secure data sharing.

8. As of October 2026

   Dobbs Professor and Paris fellow

   She is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Computer Science and Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Emory University, where she directs the AIMS Lab on trustworthy and privacy-enhancing AI for healthcare, public health, and spatial intelligence. In September 2026, she begins part of her sabbatical at the Paris Institute for Advanced Study through its Distinguished Fellowship program with PostGenAI@Paris.