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Pengcheng Xie

Pengcheng Xie 

Postdoctoral Scholar, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory & University of California, United States

Research interests: mathematical optimization, machine learning, numerical analysis, and scientific computing

PhD in Computational Mathematics, Chinese Academy of Sciences

E-mail: pxie@lbl.gov

Biography

Pengcheng Xie is a postdoctoral scholar at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the United States, working with Division Director Stefan M. Wild. His research focuses on computational mathematics, mathematical optimization, machine learning, and numerical analysis. Current projects also explore LLM-guided optimization and convergence-aware algorithm-design benchmarks. He is also exploring AI and mathematical methods for biological modeling. He earned his PhD from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, where he was advised by Prof. Ya-xiang Yuan. Pengcheng has published in leading journals and proceedings including SIAM Journal on Optimization, IMA Journal of Numerical Analysis, Optimization Methods and Software, Journal of Computational and Applied Mathematics, Journal of Computational Mathematics, Journal of the Operations Research Society of China, Chinese Annals of Mathematics, and the American Control Conference. He has also organized or presented at major international conferences such as IOS 2026, SIAM CSE 2025, INFORMS 2025, SIAM NCC 2024, ISMP 2024, ICIAM 2023, and CSIAM 2022. His academic honors and recognitions include Finalist for the Newton International Fellowship of the Royal Society (2026), the SIAM NCC26 Travel Award (2026), Finalist for the Hooke Research Fellowship at the University of Oxford (2024), the SIAM-NCC Early Career Travel Award (2024), the Hua Loo-keng Prize/Scholarship (2019–2024), the CAS AMSS President Prize/Scholarship (2023), financial support from ICIAM (2023), and the Gold Award at the China Southeast Mathematical Olympiad. He was also a Meritorious Winner in the Mathematical Contest in Modeling (2017) as a team leader. He has been invited to deliver 1-hour lectures at the University of Oxford (2024), Argonne National Laboratory (2023), Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Harvard University (2026). He has also been a visiting scholar at Princeton University (host: Prof. Amit Singer, May and July 2026), the University of Oxford's Mathematical Institute (host: Prof. Coralia Cartis, June 2024), and the University of Texas at Austin's McCombs School of Business. Beyond his research, Pengcheng has been active in professional service. He contributed to the writing of a workshop report for the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science Workshop on Inverse Problems. He is a reviewer for Mathematical Reviews/MathSciNet of the American Mathematical Society. He is a member of SIAM and MOS (since 2019), organized the minisymposium on Advances in Derivative-Free Optimization for Computational Science and Engineering at SIAM CSE25, and is organizing minisymposia at SIAM CSE27 and SIAM MDS26. He serves as an editor and referee for Applied and Computational Mathematics (2024–2027) and has reviewed for SIAM Journal on Optimization, Computer-Aided Design, Mathematical Programming, Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications, Mathematical Programming Computation, IMA Journal of Numerical Analysis, Optimization, Journal of the Operations Research Society of China, and several other journals and conferences. His joint paper on an improved adaptive orthogonal-basis deflation method was selected for the Editors’ Choice section of the Journal of Computational Mathematics. He served as President of the CAS SIAM Student Chapter (2021–2022) and is the founding Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Zhufeng (Fundamental Science), supported by the Ministry of Education of China since 2018. In addition, he has led multiple mathematical modeling and machine learning teams since 2016.

Featured Talk

A New Hybrid Neural-Quadratic Model-Based Derivative-Free Optimization Method

Berkeley Lab CS Area Postdoc Symposium, February 2026. Watch recording on YouTube | All talks

News

  • September 2026. Welcomed Ziyan Liu, Siyu Zhu, and Youyuan Ma from UC Berkeley for research mentoring.

  • Congratulations to my mentee Chuanqi Sun, who is expected to join Prof. Songxi Chen's group at Tsinghua University.

  • October 2026. My poster “A New Hybrid Neural-Quadratic Model-Based Derivative-Free Optimization Method,” joint work with Stefan M. Wild (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory), has been accepted for SIAM NCC26 at UC Davis, October 26–27, 2026. I have also been awarded a SIAM NCC26 Travel Award.

  • September 2026. I will give an invited seminar at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on December 1, 2026. Tentative title: “A New Hybrid Neural-Quadratic Model-Based Derivative-Free Optimization Method”.

  • August 2026. Organizing two minisymposia for the SIAM Conference on Computational Science and Engineering (CSE27), to be held on February 22–26, 2027, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA: Advances in Simulation-Based Optimization and Approximation Methods for Scientific Computing and Modern Optimization Methods Based on Approximation and Applications.

  • June 2026. Thanks to Dr. Stefan M. Wild for introducing our work on AI for derivative-free optimization (AI4DFO) in his plenary talk at the SIAM Conference on Optimization (OP26).

  • May 2026. Welcomed Abdulaziz AlMuallim from UC Berkeley for undergraduate research on optimization and machine learning.

  • March 2026. Co-organizing a minisymposium for the SIAM Conference on Mathematics of Data Science (MDS26), to be held on November 16–20, 2026, in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA. The tentative minisymposium title is Advances in Simulation-Based Optimization and Approximation Methods for Data Science, co-organized with Kwassi Joseph Dzahini (Argonne National Laboratory).

  • Feb. 2026. Congratulations to my mentee Yitong He on accepting an offer from Simon Fraser University.

  • April 2025. Appointed as Associate Editor for the journal Frontiers in Applied Mathematics and Statistics.

Contact Information

  • Address: 1 Cyclotron Road; Bldg 59, 3038B, Berkeley, CA 94720

  • Phone: (510) 693-6765

  • E-mail: pxie@lbl.gov, xpc@lsec.cc.ac.cn, pxie98@gmail.com

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