Industrial Engineering Welcomes Two Assistant Professors

The Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences at Northwestern Engineering has announced two new faculty hires. Naichen Shi will join this fall as an assistant professor while Zikai Xiong will come aboard as an assistant professor in the fall of 2026, with both adding their diverse backgrounds and experiences to provide unique perspectives to industrial engineering students. 

“The addition of Professors Shi and Xiong is a direct result of our department’s strategic planning initiative last year, which identified data-driven decision-making as a key focus for our future growth,” said Simge Küçükyavuz, David A. and Karen Richards Sachs Professor and Chair of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences. “Their expertise in optimization, data analytics, and smart manufacturing will not only strengthen our research efforts but also enhance our curriculum, equipping students with the analytical and computational skills needed to tackle complex real-world challenges. We are excited about the innovative research and educational contributions they will bring to our department and beyond.”

Naichen Shi 

Shi will join with joint appointments in IEMS and Northwestern Engineering’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. Currently a PhD candidate in the department of industrial and operations engineering at the University of Michigan, Shi’s research is driven by the need for novel statistical and optimization methodologies addressing scientific and engineering challenges across diverse domains, including distributed data ecosystems, digital twins, healthcare, and smart manufacturing.

Shi is also interested in investigating the theoretical underpinnings of these methods. His current research in personalized, collaborative, and decentralized data analytics explores computational techniques to integrate knowledge from multiple sources and builds tailored machine-learning models. 

Zikai Xiong

Xiong is a final-year PhD student at the MIT Operations Research Center who expects to complete his degree in May, before then spends a year as a postdoctoral fellow prior to joining IEMS. Xiong’s research interests are in optimization methods, with paired interests in theoretical foundations and computational practice.

Xiong’s 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/artificial intelligence. This work has involved developing optimization algorithms for linear and convex optimization that scale efficiently as problem sizes grow– both generically as well as for specific applications. Some of Xiong’s methods have already been implemented in state-of-art solvers.