Bio

Ling Zhang earned his Ph.D. in Industrial and Systems Engineering, with a focus on operations research, from NC State in 2020. During graduate school, he served as president of the INFORMS student chapter. In addition, he received both the Provost Recruitment Fellowship and the Fitts Graduate Fellowship.

His research explored queueing theory, stochastic optimization and large-scale simulation. As a result, he developed solutions for production planning, dynamic pricing in car-sharing networks and priority scheduling in hospital emergency departments.

After graduating, Zhang joined Amazon in 2020. Today, he serves as a Senior Research Scientist in Last Mile Science. There, he leads optimization and generative AI research for Delivery Service Partner capacity planning and scheduling worldwide. Furthermore, he oversees every stage of these planning systems, from mathematical models to production deployment. His work has saved Amazon millions of dollars while dramatically reducing planning time. In addition, he pioneered the use of agentic AI in delivery planning. These tools help planners across Amazon’s global network identify and solve complex capacity challenges.