Jingxian is passionate environmentalist and has always been interested in water-related studies. She earned her B.S. in Environmental Engineering at Villanova University and her M.S. in Environmental Engineering and Science at Stanford University. After graduation, she studied sustainable hydropower at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory as a research associate, and then worked at AECOM as an environmental consultant.

Jingxian's research aims to construct an ad-hoc index that captures the socio-economic impacts of droughts. In order to achieve this, she will develop a multilingual and location-based search mechanism that accurately selects posts related to droughts on social media, as well as a data analysis pipeline that retrieves information of the occurrences and perceived impacts of droughts.