Dr. Xu was a postdoctoral associate from 2012 to 2017. Her research was focused on ecosystem-climate interactions and identifying important feedbacks and teleconnections in the Earth-climate system. She worked on model development and numerical experimentation to investigate how the changing natural and managed environments will alter the local ecoy-hyro-climate. Her work with Dr. Schlosser involved incorporation of the WRF-ACASA model into MIT's Integrated system Model (IGSM) framework that employs the Community Atmospheric Model, and analysis of supporting field-scale and networked observations as well as supporting climate-reanalysis data for evaluation of the linked IGSM-CAM-WRF-ACASA model system.