Zeeshan Memon
Hi there! I am a third-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science at Emory University, advised by Dr. Liang Zhao. My research interests span foundation models, machine learning for optimization and decision-making, and graph learning for complex systems. I obtained my B.E. in Software Engineering from the National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST), Pakistan, in 2024, where I worked under Dr. Faisal Shafait.
Open to opportunities
I am open to research and applied scientist internships, as well as research collaborations. If my work aligns with yours, I would be glad to collaborate or discuss ideas. Feel free to reach out by email.News
Sep 2026 CONSTRAINER accepted to NeurIPS 2026!
Sep 2026 Passed my Ph.D. Qualifying Exam!
Aug 2026 EpiWorld: Grounding LLM Policy Agents in Epidemiological World Models accepted to EMNLP 2026 Findings!
Jun 2026 Received the KDD 2026 Student Travel Award.
May 2026 Towards Systematic Generalization for Power Grid Optimization Problems accepted at KDD 2026!
Apr 2026 DIPT (Deep Identification of Propagation Trees) accepted at IJCAI 2026!
Apr 2026 Excited to be joining Microsoft as a Research Intern this May — reach out if you'll be in Seattle!
Mar 2026 Two works on Epidemiology World Model and Foundation Model for Power Grid Optimization accepted to ICLR workshops!
Aug 2024 Started PhD at Emory University!
Jun 2024 LLM-Informed Discrete Prompt Optimization accepted at the ICML 2024 Workshop on LLMs and Cognition.
May 2024 Awarded NUST Rector Gold Medal for best Final Year Project in the batch of Software Engineering, and NUST President Gold Medal for highest distinction in the batch of Software Engineering.
Mar 2023 First paper, Content-aware Urdu handwriting generation, accepted at ICDAR 2023 (International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition).
Mar 2023 Selected for CERN Openlab — heading to Geneva!
Feb 2022 Selected for DAAD-funded research internship at RheinMain University of Applied Sciences.
Experience
Microsoft Research
Research Intern · Redmond, WA, USA
May 2026 – Aug 2026
Argonne National Laboratory
Visiting Student
Oct 2025 – May 2026
MICS Lab, Emory University
Graduate Research Assistant
Aug 2024 – Present
CERN
ML Research Intern
Jun – Aug 2023
RheinMain University of Applied Sciences
ML Research Intern
Jun – Sep 2022
Selected Publications
NeurIPS 2026
CONSTRAINER: Promptable Graph-Structured Optimization via Constraint Conditioning
Zeeshan Memon, Mingke Tian, Xinyuan Song, Hongwei Jin, Kibaek Kim, Liang Zhao
EMNLP 2026 Findings
Zeeshan Memon, Yiqi Su, Kai Shu, Naren Ramakrishnan, Liang Zhao
KDD 2026 Oral
Zeeshan Memon, Yijiang Li, Hongwei Jin, Kibaek Kim, Liang Zhao
ICLR 2026 Workshop
Yijiang Li, Zeeshan Memon, Hongwei Jin, Stefano Fenu, Keunju Song, Sunash B Sharma, Parfait Gasana, Hongseok Kim, Liang Zhao, Kibaek Kim
TMLR 2025
Muhammad Ahmed Mohsin, Muhammad Umer, Ahsan Bilal, Zeeshan Memon, Muhammad Ibtsaam Qadir, ...
IJCAI 2026
Zeeshan Memon, Chen Ling, Ruochen Kong, Vishwanath Seshagiri, Andreas Zufle, Liang Zhao
Teaching
- Teaching Assistant, CS 584: Spatial Computing, Emory University
- Teaching Assistant, CS 584: Deep Learning on Graphs, Emory University
- Teaching Assistant, CS 110: Computer Science Fundamentals, Emory University
- Teaching Assistant, CS 250: Data Structures and Algorithms, SEECS, National University of Sciences and Technology
Achievements
- Student Travel Award, KDD 2026
- Awarded Rector’s Gold Medal for best final-year undergraduate research project
- Awarded Presidential Gold Medal for securing rank one in batch in Bachelors of Software Engineering
- Selected as prestigious Openlab Researcher at CERN from pool of 2000 candidates (1.5% acceptance rate)
- Awarded prestigious MBZUAI undergraduate fully funded research internship
- Awarded DAAD fully funded research internship
- Got NUST Merit Based Scholarship for 8 consecutive semesters
Services
Conference Reviewer/Program Committee
- PC Member, IEEE International Conference on Data Science and Advanced Analytics 2025
- PC Member, LLMs4Science @ AAAI 2025
- Reviewer, NeurIPS 2026
- Reviewer, KDD 2026
Journal Reviewer
- Reviewer, IEEE Transactions on Big Data
- Reviewer, IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems
Last updated: October 2026