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 love coding and science. At the end of the day, what makes me happy isn’t publishing a paper. It’s doing solid work that actually moves the field forward — whether that’s a tool, a model, or a line of code that makes the field’s life easier. I believe science should be accessible to everyone, and open-source is how I try to make that real - peep the goods on my GitHub.

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

Services

Conference Reviewers

NIPS 2025, KDD 2025, ICLR 2025

Journal Reviewers

• IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics

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.