Xiwen received her Bachelor of Science degree from Haverford College in 2019. Under the supervision of Professors Alex Norquist and Joshua Schrier, she studied the role of noncovalent interactions in templated vanadium tellurites and investigated anthropogenic biases in chemical reaction data using a combination of experimental and computational techniques. In addition, she worked on the high-throughput synthesis of organohalide hybrid perovskites.

She is now a graduate student in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University and a member of the Friend group. She currently investigates oxidation reactions over Au based single crystal surfaces using scanning tunneling microscopy under ultra-high vacuum conditions for fundamental understandings of heterogenous catalysis.