Faculty DirectoryZikai Xiong
Assistant Professor of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences
Contact
2145 Sheridan RoadTech M239
Evanston, IL 60208-3109
Email Zikai Xiong
Website
Departments
Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences
Education
Ph.D. in Operations Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
B.S. in Mathematics and Applied Mathematics, Fudan University
Biography
Zikai Xiong is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences at Northwestern University. His research broadly focuses on the development and analysis of optimization algorithms, with an emphasis on both theory and computation.
Xiong received his Ph.D. in Operations Research from the MIT Operations Research Center in 2025, where he was advised by Robert M. Freund. Before joining Northwestern, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Georgia Tech's H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, working with Katya Scheinberg.
Research Interests
Xiong's research focuses on developing, understanding, and enhancing optimization algorithms, particularly for large-scale problems and settings with limited information or computational resources. His interests span the theoretical foundations, algorithm design, and computational practice of optimization, with applications in operations research, data science, and machine learning.