PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Mengjie Zhang

Also known as Meng

Mengjie Zhang is a professor of computer science at Victoria University of Wellington whose research applies evolutionary computation, especially genetic programming, to machine learning tasks such as feature selection, computer vision and scheduling. He earned a PhD at RMIT University, began teaching computer science at Victoria in 2000, and coauthored a 2016 survey of evolutionary approaches to feature selection. Fellowships of the Royal Society Te Apārangi in 2017 and the IEEE in 2018 followed, and in 2023 he became founding director of Te Whiri Kawe, the university's Centre for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence. His later honours include the 2024 Australasian Artificial Intelligence Distinguished Research Contribution Award and the 2025 ACM SIGEVO Outstanding Contribution Award. He directs the centre and heads the Evolutionary Computation and Machine Learning Research Group; with Bing Xue, he led the bid that brought the Pacific Rim International Conference on Artificial Intelligence to Wellington in November 2025.

Works
1,064
Citations
33,495
h-index
82
Rankings
#31 by last-author papers and #61 by cited papers
Badges

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 22 October 2026.

Timeline

  1. 2000

    Teaching computer science in Wellington

    He holds a PhD from RMIT University as well as BE and ME degrees. In 2000, he begins teaching a wide range of computer science courses at Victoria University of Wellington.

  2. 2006–2016

    Genetic programming and feature selection

    From 2006 to 2008, he leads a Marsden Fund project on novel program structures and search algorithms in genetic programming. In 2016, he coauthors “A Survey on Evolutionary Computation Approaches to Feature Selection” with Bing Xue, Will Browne and Xin Yao in IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation.

  3. November 2017

    Royal Society Te Apārangi fellowship

    In November 2017, he is one of five Victoria University of Wellington staff made fellows of the Royal Society Te Apārangi. His research covers evolutionary computation and learning, genetic programming, large-scale feature selection, computer vision and image processing, scheduling and combinatorial optimisation, and deep and transfer learning.

  4. 2018–2019

    IEEE Fellow and CEC 2019

    He becomes an IEEE Fellow in 2018 for contributions to evolutionary learning and optimization methodologies. In June 2019, as general co-chair, he hosts the IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation at Victoria University of Wellington.

  5. 2023

    Founding Te Whiri Kawe

    He leads the establishment of Te Whiri Kawe—Centre for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence at Victoria University of Wellington and becomes its director when it launches in June 2023. In 2023, he also receives the EvoStar/SPECIES Award for Outstanding Contribution to Evolutionary Computation in Europe and publishes the Handbook of Evolutionary Machine Learning with Wolfgang Banzhaf and Penousal Machado.

  6. 2024–2025

    Australasian AI and SIGEVO awards

    In 2024, he receives the Australasian Artificial Intelligence Distinguished Research Contribution Award at the AJCAI conference in Melbourne, the first AI researcher in New Zealand to win it. ACM SIGEVO names him and Frank Neumann as recipients of its 2025 Outstanding Contribution Award.

  7. November 2025

    PRICAI comes to Wellington

    With Bing Xue, deputy director of Te Whiri Kawe, he leads the successful bid to host the Pacific Rim International Conference on Artificial Intelligence at Victoria University of Wellington in November 2025. The conference draws 550 researchers from 30 countries.

  8. As of October 2026

    Director of Te Whiri Kawe

    He is a professor of computer science (AI) at Victoria University of Wellington, where he directs Te Whiri Kawe and heads the Evolutionary Computation and Machine Learning Research Group. In March 2026, he names the group and the centre, which mentor PhD students and early-career researchers, as the contributions he is most proud of.

Career

  1. Since 2000Victoria University of WellingtonProfessor of computer science (AI), Director
  2. 2025–2026Guangzhou University

Education

  1. RMIT UniversityPhD

From the biography and OpenAlex affiliations (the years of papers that list the organization), so some years are approximate.

Most-cited works

  1. A Survey on Evolutionary Computation Approaches to Feature Selection2015 · IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation · 1,842 citationsWith Xin Yao
  2. Particle Swarm Optimization for Feature Selection in Classification: A Multi-Objective Approach2012 · IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics · 1,273 citations
  3. Deep Reconstruction-Classification Networks for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation2016 · Lecture notes in computer science · 952 citations
  4. Automatically Designing CNN Architectures Using the Genetic Algorithm for Image Classification2020 · IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics · 873 citations
  5. Evolving Deep Convolutional Neural Networks for Image Classification2019 · IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation · 778 citations

From OpenAlex, as of 21 October 2026.

  1. The company share of AI researchers’ top papers was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974Includes Victoria University of Wellington. We estimate where the people shaping AI worked when their most-cited papers appeared: the company share was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974, and Google led all organizations in 2020–2024.
  2. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionIncludes RMIT University. We estimate where the people shaping AI studied and where their careers led. Massachusetts Institute of Technology leads with 467 former students, including 291 recorded doctorates.
  3. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labsIncludes Guangzhou University. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labs. We compare publishing careers, recent citations, dual appointments and job moves across 2,420 university researchers and 308 frontier-lab researchers.
  4. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other universityIncludes RMIT University. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other university. We compare doctorate and 5+ year employment links, career timing and current workplaces for 187 major-prize and 1,111 best-paper winners.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Mengjie Zhang yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Dr. Mengjie Zhang, Scientific Advisor | Complexica complexica.com. Checked 20 October 2026.
  2. Mengjie Zhang's Homepage homepages.ecs.vuw.ac.nz. Checked 20 October 2026.
  3. Volume 19, Issue 1 – SIGEVOlution evolution.sigevo.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  4. Five Victoria staff made fellows of the Royal Society wgtn.ac.nz. Checked 20 October 2026.
  5. Artificial Intelligence researcher named IEEE Fellow wgtn.ac.nz. Checked 20 October 2026.
  6. CDSAI Director receives the 2024 Australasian Artificial Intelligence Distinguished Research Contribution Award wgtn.ac.nz. Checked 20 October 2026.
  7. Launch of Te Whiri Kawe—Centre for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence wgtn.ac.nz. Checked 20 October 2026.
  8. IEEE VIC CIS Talk on Evolutionary Machine Learning: Research, Applications and Challenges events.vtools.ieee.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  9. Record-breaking AI conference held in Wellington wellingtonnz.com. Checked 20 October 2026.