Kaixiong Zhou

Kaixiong Zhou

Assistant Professor, NCSU ECE"

About me

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at North Carolina State University, affilitated with the NCSU Global One Health Academy, Plant Sciences Initiative, and Battery and Energy Storage Systems Initiative. Prior to joining NCSU, I was a Postdoctoral Associate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, working on drug discovery and synthetic biology with Prof. James J. Collins. I received my Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Rice University, 2023, under the supervision of Prof. Xia (Ben) Hu. I received the Bachelor degree from Sun Yat-Sen University (SYSU) in 2015, and received the Master degree from University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in 2018.

I am leading SEEK Lab at NCSU ECE Department. We focus on developing eļ¬ƒcient, trustworthy, and use-inspired machine learning algorithms in the fields of AI for science & engineering, geometric deep learning, multi-modal foundation models, and agents. My research contributes to tackling challenges in various applications including synthetic biology, drug discovery, healthcare informatics, and network analysis. Specifically, we are interested in the following topics:

  • Generative AI for Science: de novo designs of small molecules, proteins, and nucleic acid sequences.
  • Explainable AI for Science: functional motif discovery.
  • Scientific Agents: enabling alignment and reasoning of scientific knowledge in LLMs.
  • Trustworthy Multi-modal Foundation Models: robustness, knowledge editing.


    • NCSU Email: kzhou22 at ncsu.edu.

    Prospective students (undergraduate/graduate) and interns: I am actively looking for self-motivated students. Please feel free to drop me an email kaixiong.zhou.001@gmail.com together with resume and transcripts if you are interested.


    News

    Jun. 2025: Thrilled to receive ORAU Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Award, 2025.

    Aug. 2024: Join NCSU ECE as an Assistant Professor, 2024.

    Sep. 2023: Join MIT IMES as a Postdoc, 2023.

    Apr. 2023: One paper accepted by ICML, 2023.

    Apr. 2023: One paper accepted by IJCAI, 2023.

    Dec. 2022: Two papers accepted by SDM, 2023.

    Sept. 2022: One paper accepted by QTML, 2022.

    Sept. 2022: One paper accepted by NeurIPS Datasets and Benchmarks Track, 2022.

    Aug 2022: One paper accepted by CIKM, 2022.

    June 2022: Thrilled to receive the Student Travel Award, KDD 2022.

    May 2022: Thrilled to start my summer internship at Google.