Associate Dean of Research and Innovation at the University of Surrey’s Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences, where he holds a Chair in Sustainable Processes, an EPSRC Open Fellowship, and is a Turing Fellow at The Alan Turing Institute.
Before joining the University of Surrey in 2022, he was Head of Chemical Engineering at Loughborough University. Prof. Xuan is internationally recognised for his pioneering work at the interface of energy and AI, winning the Philip Leverhulme Prize for Engineering (2022) and the Beilby Medal and Prize (2020). He also led the UKRI CircularChem Centre, which received the IChemE Global Award for Sustainability (2023) and the RSC John Jeyes Horizon Prize (2025). He plays a leading role in shaping the research agenda as a member of the EPSRC Strategic Advisory Team for Energy and Decarbonisation, the EPSRC EDI Strategic Advisory Group, and the Engineering Professors’ Council Research, Innovation & Knowledge Transfer Committee. A founding figure in the global Energy and AI community, Prof. Xuan is Founding Editor-in-Chief of Digital Chemical Engineering (IChemE), Founding Editor of Energy and AI (Elsevier), and co-chair of the International Conference on Energy and AI series. He also advocates for responsible research assessment and equality, diversity and inclusion, authoring the influential paper The equality, diversity and inclusion in energy and AI: Call for actions.