Jia Xu is the senior director of strategy for the unmanned aerial systems and urban air mobility at Honeywell Aerospace. Before joining Honeywell, Xu worked as chief architect for urban air mobility systems at Airbus, where he led the development of operational architectures and business cases for UAM. He also held research and leadership positions at the RAND Corporation, where he led advanced technology programs in artificial intelligence and machine learning, UAS, and autonomy. On the vehicle and engineering side, Jia has led UAS design and engineering analysis efforts at General Atomics and has taught applied aerodynamics as an adjunct lecturer at Stanford.

Jia received his Ph.D. in aeronautics and astronautics from Stanford. He also holds Master of Science degrees in computational methods from Imperial College London and international relations from the London School of Economics – both completed under the tenure of a Marshall Scholarship.