Dafeng Xu

In Autumn 2019, Dafeng Xu joined the Evans School of Public Policy & Governance as an assistant professor. Dafeng specializes in data science, and his areas of research include urban and regional policy, immigration policy, and the social and economic history of the United States.

Dafeng’s ongoing research is focused on developing and employing data science tools to link individual records between census, administrative, and survey data. Two projects using methods in data science include linking 1920 and 1930 U.S. census data, and linking 1940 U.S. census data to Health and Retirement Study (HRS) and Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). Based on these projects, Dafeng studies the social and economic impacts of urban and regional immigration policies. Study of these policies include how U.S. immigration restriction laws in the 1920s impacted immigrants’ segregation patterns, cultural assimilation, and how local governments responded to natural disasters.

Dafeng received his Ph.D. in City and Regional Planning from Cornell University in 2016, with a minor in demography. He received his Master’s in Systems Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 2013 and B.S. in Computer Science from Peking University in 2011. Prior to joining the Evans School in 2019, he was a postdoctoral scholar in the Minnesota Population Center at the University of Minnesota.

For more information on his research interests and publications, visit his website: http://dafengxu.weebly.com