Incoming IEMS Faculty Member Zikai Xiong Wins INFORMS Optimization Society Student Paper Prize

Incoming Northwestern Engineering faculty member Zikai Xiong won the 2025 Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) Optimization Society Student Paper Prize.

Xiong, who will join the McCormick School of Engineering’s Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences next fall as an assistant professor, was honored for his solely authored paper "Accessible Theoretical Complexity of the Restarted Primal-Dual Hybrid Gradient Method for Linear Programs with Unique Optima." Written when he was a PhD student at the MIT Operations Research Center, Xiong’s paper was cited by INFORMS for developing the first accessible iteration bound for the restarted primal-dual hybrid gradient method, a method that has emerged as a particularly successful alternative for solving large-scale linear programs.

The INFORMS Optimization Society Student Paper Prize is awarded annually to one (or more) students for the most outstanding paper in optimization that is submitted to and received or published in a refereed professional journal within three calendar years preceding the year of the award.  

Xiong’s research interests are in optimization methods, with paired interests in theoretical foundations and computational practice. His research aims to extend the capability of modern optimization methods to efficiently solve ever-larger problems arising in operations research, data science, and machine learning/AI.