Qingfu Zhang

Timeline

1. 1984–1994

   Degrees in mathematics and information processing

   He earns a BSc in mathematics at Shanxi University in 1984, then an MSc in applied mathematics in 1991 and a PhD in information processing in 1994 at Xidian University.

2. 1994–2000

   Research appointments across Asia and Europe

   From 1994 to 1997, he serves as a postdoctoral researcher and associate professor at the National University of Defence Science and Technology. He then takes research posts at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, the German National Research Centre for Information Technology's AiS, and UMIST through 2000.

3. 2000–2016

   Professorships at Essex and CityU

   At Essex, he progresses from Lecturer through Senior Lecturer and Reader to Professor between 2000 and 2016. He also holds a Professor and Chair Professor appointment at CityU from 2014.

4. 2009

   MOEA/D wins a competition

   In 2009, MOEA/D wins the Unconstrained Multiobjective Evolutionary Algorithm Competition at the IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation. Zhang and Hui Li's 2007 paper describes MOEA/D, Zhang's best-known algorithm, which splits a multiobjective problem into single-objective subproblems that cooperate during search.

5. 2010

   An IEEE paper award

   In 2010, the IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation gives its Outstanding Paper Award to Zhang and Hui Li for their 2007 MOEA/D paper.

6. 2011

   Changjiang visiting chair professor

   In 2011, he serves as a Changjiang Visiting Chair Professor at Xidian University.

7. 2023

   Large language models in MOEA/D

   In a 2023 paper, Zhang and six colleagues let a general large language model act as a zero-shot search operator for MOEA/D. They also propose MOEA/D-LO, a white-box operator based on the language model's behavior.

8. Since January 2026

   Principal investigator for an LLM project

   Since January 2026, he leads a CityU project on evolutionary algorithms with large language models for automated algorithm design. As of October 2026, he is a Chair Professor in CityU's Department of Computer Science and a principal investigator in the Optima Group.