Speaker Bio

Jia Xu is the CEO of SkyGrid, a Boeing company working to open the sky for autonomous flight. Xu brings decades of strategic, technical, product development, and market leadership to SkyGrid.

Before his tenure at SkyGrid, he served as the Chief Technology Officer for unmanned aerial systems and urban air mobility at Honeywell Aerospace. Previously, Xu was chief architect for advanced 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 advanced programs in AI/ML, uncrewed aircraft, and autonomy. On the vehicle side, Jia has led UAS design efforts at General Atomics.

Jia received his Ph.D. in aeronautics and astronautics from Stanford University. He also holds master’s 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.