Cyril Xu

Cyril Xu

This site was last updated on 2 September 2025

My New Journey

1 minute read

Published:

This is the beginning of an exciting new journey in my research career. I’m exploring fascinating new territories in computational chemistry and materials science.

The Start of Something New

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Research Directions

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Computational Methods

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Future Collaborations

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What’s Next

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  • First milestone: Complete literature review
  • Second milestone: Develop initial models
  • Third milestone: Validate against experimental data
  • Fourth milestone: Publish findings

Conclusion

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Regular expressions for replication

9 minute read

Published:

As part of the publication process for my recent article on how states preempt separatist conflict, I needed to submit replication materials to the journal. I took my graduate quantitative methods sequence with the late Tom Carsey, so I’ve long been a proponent replicability efforts in social science. I also had an hourly job in grad school replicating quantitative results for multiple political science journals, so I’m very familiar with best practices for replication. Unfortunately, in the four years since I wrote the first line of code for this project, somewhere in between defending my dissertation and starting a new job (ok, fine, almost immediately after writing that first line of code), I got a little lazy.

Faceted maps in R

19 minute read

Published:

I recently needed to create a choropleth of a few different countries for a project on targeting of UN peacekeepers by non-state armed actors I’m working on. A choropleth is a type of thematic map where data are aggregated up from smaller areas (or discrete points) to larger ones and then visualized using different colors to represent different numeric values.

Finding Backcountry Campsites with CalTopo, OpenStreetMap, and R

32 minute read

Published:

Like many people, I’ve been spending more time outdoors during this pandemic. While this means daily walks in my neighborhood, it also means getting out into the wilderness and sleeping in a tent when I can. Although outdoor recreation is one of the safer ways to entertain yourself these days, it’s not without its own concerns. The difficulty of safely getting to trailheads means that while I’m backpacking more than usual, it’s still not as often as I’d like.