Fred Zhangzhi Peng
About Me
Hey there! I’m Fred, a third-year Ph.D. student at Duke University. I have broad interests in machine learning, and its applications in life science. I work with Anru on statistical machine learning, Alex on generative models, Chris on ML4Bio. My research aims to scale up the math on GPUs and see what wonderful things emerge.
I code so the field don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Building tools, and infra one commit at a time — peep the goods on my GitHub.
I believe science should be acessible to everyone. That said, I’m being as transparent as possible about my research and commited to support you; hit me up if you think I can be helpful.
Recently been vibing with discrete diffusion models—making it faster (few-step) sampling, or slower (inference-time scaling), and real applications in bio-sequence design and code generation.
Long-term problems I’m pursuing:
- Generative Models
- Protein Design
- Discrete Diffusion Models (or the hype name diffusion large langauge models)
- Protein Language Models (pLMs).
News
- [Aug. 2025] Interned with the ByteDance-Seed AI-for-Science team.
- [Oct. 2024] NSF Travel Award for CIKM 2024.
- [Oct. 2024] Duke BME Travel Award for BMES 2024.
Publications
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Transparency and reproducibility are important to me. I ensure open code accompanying my first-author publications. Below are selected papers. Please refer to my Google Scholar for complete publications.
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DeLTa@ICLR2025
DeLTa@ICLR2025 Outstanding Paper Award -
Nature Methods
ICML24
Services
Conference Reviewers
NIPS 2025, KDD 2025, ICLR 2025
Journal Reviewers
Misc
- None of my work would be possible without the amazing brains I work with, Chengtong Wang, Zachary W Bezemek etc.
- I like boxing, running, swimming, hooping, surfing, skiing etc. Besides sports, I like watching loss go down and the diffusion sampling process.
- I care about education equality and try to spend the rest of my spare time making science and knowledge more open.