Mengjia Xu

Assistant Professor, Data Science
About Me
Dr. Mengjia Xu is currently an Assistant Professor at Department of Data Science, Ying Wu College of Computing, NJIT. She also holds a Research Affiliate position with the MIT NSF Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines (CBMM) at McGovern Institute for Brain Research. Prior to NJIT, she was a Research Assistant Professor in the Division of Applied Mathematics at Brown University. Concurrently, she held a joint postdoctoral position at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research. Before her joint postdoc at MIT and Brown, she completed her PhD degree at the Department of Computer Science, Northeastern University (China) and two-year joint PhD at Brown University.
Education
Ph.D.; Northeastern University; Computer Science; 2017
Website
https://gracexu182.github.io/
2026 Fall Courses
CS 489 - COMPUTER SCIENCE RESEARCH PROJ
CS 701B - MASTER'S THESIS
CS 725 - INDEPENDENT STUDY I
CS 726 - INDEPENDENT STUDY II
CS 792 - PRE-DOCTORAL RESEARCH
DS 493 - DATA SCIENCE CAPSTONE II
DS 790A - DOCT DISSERTATION & RES
DS 492 - DATA SCIENCE CAPSTONE I
DS 701C - MASTER'S THESIS
DS 492 - DATA SCIENCE CAPSTONE I- HONORS
DS 725 - INDEPENDENT STUDY I
DS 791 - GRADUATE SEMINAR
DS 493 - DATA SCIENCE CAPSTONE II- HONORS
DS 700B - MASTER'S PROJECT
DS 792B - PRE-DOCTORAL RESEARCH
CS 790A - DOCT DISSERTATION & RES
DS 726 - INDEPENDENT STUDY II
CS 700B - MASTER'S PROJECT
DS 488 - INDEPENDENT STUDY IN DS
DS 701B - MASTER'S THESIS
CS 488 - INDEPENDENT STUDY IN CS
Past Courses
DS 675: MACHINE LEARNING
DS 677: DEEP LEARNING
DS 683: GRAPH NEURAL NETWORKS
Research Interests
Machine learning theory; graph representation learning for diverse applications (e.g., Alzheimer's disease early stage detection, human brain aging trajectory detection, climate data modeling, etc.)
Journal Article
Jonas Tirona, Sarang Patil, Spiridon Kasapis, Eren Dogan, John Stefan, Irina N. Kitiashvili, Alexander G. Kosovichev, Mengjia Xu. 2026. "Forecasting Continuum Intensity for Solar Active Region Emergence Prediction Using Transformers." Journal of Geophysical Research Machine Learning and Computation, vol. 3, pp. 01207.
Spiridon Kasapis, Eren Dogan, Irina N. Kitiashvili, Alexander G. Kosovichev, John T. Stefan, Jake D. Butler, Jonas Tirona, Sarang Patil, Mengjia Xu. 2026. "SolARED: Solar Active Region Emergence Dataset for Machine Learning Aided Predictions." \solphys, vol. 301, no. 7, pp. 106.
Eren Dogan, Spiridon Kasapis, Sarang Patil, Jonas Tirona, John Stefan, Irina Kitiashvili, Mengjia Xu, Alexander G. Kosovichev. 2026. "Prediction of Magnetic Flux Evolution During Solar Active Region Emergence using Long Short-Term Memory Networks." arXiv e-prints, pp. arXiv:2604.03507.
Jonas Tirona, Sarang Patil, Spiridon Kasapis, Eren Dogan, John Stefan, Irina N. Kitiashvili, Alexander G. Kosovichev, Mengjia Xu. 2026. "Forecasting Continuum Intensity for Solar Active Region Emergence Prediction using Transformers." arXiv e-prints, pp. arXiv:2601.13144.
Mengjia Xu, Akshay Rangamani, Qianli Liao, Tomer Galanti, Tomaso Poggio. 2023. "Dynamics in Deep Classifiers trained with the Square Loss: normalization, low rank, neural collapse and generalization bounds." Research.
Cole Baker, Su\'arez-M\'endez, Isabel, Grace Smith, Elisabeth B Marsh, Michael Funke, John C Mosher, Maest\'u, Fernando, Mengjia Xu, Dimitrios Pantazis. 2023. "Hyperbolic graph embedding of MEG brain networks to study brain alterations in individuals with subjective cognitive decline." bioRxiv, pp. 2023--10.
Conference Proceeding
"ML-driven early detection of solar active region emergence for space-weather forecasting"
August, 2026.
"Machine Learning Aided Predictions of Magnetic Flux and Continuum Intensity During the Emergence of Active Regions"
December, 2025.
"SolARED: Solar Active Region Emergence Dataset for Machine Learning Aided Predictions"
December, 2025.
"Norm-based Generalization Bounds for Sparse Neural Networks"
2023.
Other
"Generalization in deep network classifiers trained with the square loss"
https://cbmm.mit.edu/sites/default/files/publications/TPR\_ver59.pdf, 2020.