Xi Song is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and the College at the University of Chicago. She is also an Affiliate of the Population Research Center and the Center on Demography and Economics of Aging at the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago, a Faculty Sponsor of the Center for East Asian Studies, an Associate of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, and a Member of the Committee on Quantitative Research Methodology for the Social and Behavioral Sciences.

Song received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2015, with the dissertation "Social Stratification in Multiple Generations." Before that, she completed her Master of Sciences in Statistics at UCLA in 2013, Master of Philosophy in Social Sciences at HKUST in 2010, and Bachelor of Arts with the Highest Academic Honors ​at Renmin University of China in 2008.

Song is interested in the origin of social inequality from a multigenerational perspective. Her research uses demographic, statistical, and computational tools to study the rise and fall of families in human populations across time and place. Her goal is to construct and capitalize on large-scale genealogical microdata, broadly defined, to improve understanding of: (1) long-term social inequality among families; (2) the demography of family growth and extinction; (3) the interplay of social mobility within and between generations, and (4) the sociological basis of evolutionary demography and population dynamics.