Eric Poe Xing () is an American computer scientist who has been serving as president of Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) since January 2021. He is also a professor in the Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science.
Xing received a B.Sc. in physics from Tsinghua University in 1993, a Ph.D. in molecular biology and biochemistry from Rutgers University in 1999 and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley in 2004.
Xing joined Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) as a faculty member in 2004, where he created the SAILING Lab. He served as the founding director of CMUâÂÂs Center for Machine Learning and Health, established in 2015 as part of the Pittsburgh Health Data Alliance, a collaboration between CMU, the University of Pittsburgh, and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.
He held visiting appointments from 2010 to 2011, serving as a visiting research professor at Facebook Inc. and as a visiting associate professor in the Department of Statistics at Stanford University.
In 2016, Xing co-founded Petuum Inc., a US-based startup. In 2017, Petuum raised $93 million in a round of venture funding from SoftBank. In 2018 Petuum was named a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer.
On 29 November 2020, Xing was appointed president of the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), with the appointment taking effect in January 2021.
In 2024, Xing co-founded GenBio AI where he is chief scientist. The US-based startup, which he co-founded with David Baker, Ziv Bar-Joseph, Emma Lundberg, Le Song and Fred Hu, aims to create AI-driven digital organisms (AIDO) for the purposes of modeling medical treatments.
Xing has overseen the launch of the MBZUAI Institute of Foundation Models (IFM), which focuses on research and development of large-scale foundation models. In 2025âÂÂ2026, IFM released the open-source reasoning model K2 Think, which was covered internationally as part of the UAEâÂÂs push to develop domestically controlled (âÂÂsovereignâÂÂ) AI capabilities. IFM presented PAN as a âÂÂworld modelâ research project and demonstrated related systems publicly. MBZUAI also collaborated with G42 and Cerebras Systems on the Jais language model, an open-source ArabicâÂÂEnglish large language model released in 2023, according to Reuters.
Xing is a recipient of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Career Award and the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship.
Xing is an elected Fellow of the following institutes and associations: