Ning Xu is a professor and doctoral supervisor in the Department of Physics at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC). After receiving his Ph.D. from Yale University, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Chicago, and later as a research assistant professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He joined USTC as a professor in 2010. He has also been affiliated with the CAS Key Laboratory of Soft Matter Chemistry, the Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at the Microscale, and the CAS Key Laboratory of Microscale Magnetic Resonance. In 2011, he was appointed as a C. N. Yang Visiting Scholar at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, received the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars in 2013, and began serving as Vice Dean of the School of Physical Sciences in September 2014.

His research focuses on the dynamics and phase transitions of amorphous systems in soft matter physics, properties of amorphous solids, quasicrystals, mechanical metamaterials, rheology, and nonequilibrium statistical physics. He has published 73 SCI-indexed papers, including 1 in Nature, 2 in Nature Physics, 2 in Nature Materials, 4 in Nature Communications, 3 in PNAS, 1 in Science Advances, 2 in National Science Review, and 21 in Physical Review Letters.