Faculty Spotlight: Dr. Jiusi "Josie" Xiao

Dr. Jiusi "Josie" Xiao does not arrive at her classroom with answers. She arrives with questions, sharper ones than her students expect, and far more demanding of them. In an era that rewards speed and punishes uncertainty, the economics professor at Saint Mary's College of California has built her reputation on something almost countercultural: the deliberate, rigorous refusal to conclude too quickly. When students encounter headlines about discrimination, artificial intelligence, or inequality, Xiao does not affirm or dismiss. She presses a harder follow-up into the room: What does the data actually show?

Her scholarship centers on the American prosecutor, a figure less visible to the public eye than the police officers and judges who tend to draw the spotlight. Prosecutors' work is simply less high-profile, though their discretion is broad and can meaningfully influence how a case unfolds, alongside the many other agencies and actors who play important roles before and during court proceedings. Xiao studies these decisions with the care of someone who knows how easily rigorous inquiry can be mistaken for ideology, and vice versa. "Discrimination is a very heavy word," she says. "Just because we observe a difference in outcomes doesn't mean discrimination is the cause." Her method relies on randomized case assignments, stripping away context and circumstance to isolate bias where it exists.

The same discipline carries into her teaching, and Saint Mary's, it turns out, is an unusually good place to practice it. This is not an institution that mistakes scale for ambition. Tucked into the hills of Moraga, it operates on a register that most research universities have long since abandoned: small enough that a professor genuinely knows her students, unhurried enough that a conversation can go somewhere. Xiao speaks warmly of her own education at USC, which included plenty of small, high-quality classroom experiences. But at large universities, lecture halls can be vast, and a student can go unnoticed without actively trying; many students come to know their teaching assistants before their professors. Saint Mary's offers something closer to what education, at its best, is supposed to feel like. A name remembered. A question taken seriously. An office hour that becomes a real conversation.

That intimacy is not incidental. It is, in many ways, the curriculum. Economics, in Xiao's courses, is not a ledger of formulas or a gateway credential. It is a practice, a way of understanding how people navigate scarcity, how policies produce consequences their architects never intended, how data can illuminate or deceive depending on how it is held. "I want to give students the tools," she says. "Not the opinions." In a smaller classroom, that kind of teaching lands differently. Students cannot disappear into the back row. They are expected to think out loud, to be wrong in front of each other, to try again.

The College's Lasallian tradition runs deeper than its brochure language suggests. Its founding commitment to educating the whole person, not merely the credentialed one, shapes the way Saint Mary's understands what a degree is actually for. For Xiao, whose research sits at the intersection of inequality, justice, and evidence, that ethos is less a selling point than a genuine alignment. The questions she asks in her scholarship are the same ones the institution has long asked of itself: who is being served, who is being seen, and whether the gap between those two things can be honestly measured.

When the conversation turns to AI, and it always does eventually, Xiao declines the panic. She frames machine intelligence as a recognizable chapter in a long economic history: a technology that shifts the premium on certain skills without replacing the one that cannot be automated. Critical thinking. "You're welcome to use AI," she tells her students, "as long as you know what you're doing." At an institution that has never confused information with wisdom, that distinction carries weight.

Away from campus, her life has the texture of deliberate ordinariness. She and her husband, also an economist, have agreed not to bring work home. Their four-year-old daughter has strong opinions about drawing and the outdoors. And their dog, Biscuit, rescued in Korea before making homes in Los Angeles and now the Bay Area, has adapted cheerfully to every chapter of the family's journey.

The campus still moves her, which is worth saying plainly: not every professor feels that way about where they work. The winding approach through the hills, the wildlife that materializes unexpectedly across its grounds, the particular quality of quiet that a place earns when it has resisted the pressure to be somewhere else. "I get excited when I come to campus," she says. "It's a great place to work. I get to see my students. They know me. I know them."

In a culture that rewards the quick verdict and the confident take, Josie Xiao is offering something rarer: the practiced ability to slow down, weigh the evidence, and arrive at a conclusion only when it has been earned. Saint Mary's, at its best, is the right setting for that lesson. A place that still believes the examined question is worth more than the ready answer.