Wenfei Xu is an assistant professor in Cornell University's City and Regional Planning Department in the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning. She is also the director of the Urban Data Research Lab. Her research questions how housing policies, practices, institutions, and technologies have shaped urban inequality, with an orientation toward methods in urban analytics. She works on topics in social-spatial stratification, segregation, race and ethnicity, data science, mapping, and neighborhood change in the United States. Her work has ranged 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. Xu received her Ph.D. in urban planning from Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, a dual master’s degree in architecture and urban planning from MIT's Department of Architecture and Department of Urban Studies and Planning, and a Bachelor's of Arts in economics from the University of Chicago.