Recently, Shanghai Municipal Human Resources and Social Security Bureau announced the list of postdoctors to be funded by 2021 Shanghai Super Postdoctor Incentive Program. Xu Lilong, a postdoctor from the School of Foreign Languages entered the program, becoming the first postdoctor from SFL to win the honor. A total of 525 postdoctors were sponsored in this batch, among which there were 128 from Shanghai Jiao Tong University (including medical school) .

The Shanghai Super Postdoctor Incentive Program, which is jointly launched by the Shanghai Municipal Human Resources and Social Security Bureau and Shanghai Municipal Finance Bureau, aims to further stimulate the innovation and creativity of excellent postdoctors by  guaranteeing their pay and benefits. The postdoctors in the program will be funded by the Shanghai Special Fund for Talent Development at the rate of RMB 150,000 per person per year for 2 years.

Xu Lilong studied at the School of Foreign Languages of Shanghai Jiao Tong University for her undergraduate and graduate years, receiving the first-class scholarship of Shanghai Jiao Tong University and winning the honor of Shanghai Outstanding Graduates. In 2016, she was awarded a full scholarship to pursue her PhD at the University of Cambridge. Her research interests are: English for Chinese students, Chinese syntactic-morphological interface for foreign students, syntactic-semantic interface, and acquisition of syntactic-semantic-pragmatic interface knowledge. During her PhD years at the University of Cambridge, she focused on language acquisition studies based on generative grammar theory, including bilingual and multilingual acquisition, and published several papers in international conferences and journals such as GASLA and EuroSLA.

In addition to her research, Xu Lilong is a core member of the organizing committee of the inter-university PUP Cloud Research Community. She actively organizes a series of inter-university doctoral forums, academic salons and seminars to build a platform for teachers and students from different institutions to communicate.