Wanpeng Xu
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Mail code: 2080Campus: Poly
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Student Information
Graduate StudentEngineering Education Systems and Design
Ira A Fulton Engineering
Wanpeng Xu is a PhD student in Engineering Education Systems and Design at Arizona State University, with an expected graduation in Fall 2027. His research spans two areas: AI for education, and identity & inclusion in engineering. On the AI side, he studies theory-grounded, multi-agent LLM systems that generate coherent, pedagogically aligned course materials while keeping teaching faculty in control of the design process. This work has appeared at EACL 2026 and the Learning Engineering Research Network Convening. On the inclusion side, he conducts qualitative studies of Asian, LGBTQIA+, and neurodivergent engineering students and has organized panels at the ASEE Annual Conference on Asian queer experiences in engineering and on ADHD in engineering.
He teaches first-year engineering courses at ASU, including FSE 100: Introduction to Engineering and ASU 101-EGR: The ASU Experience, and approaches teaching with the belief that engineering should be built on kindness and support from students' very first day.
Before beginning his PhD, he worked as a research administrator at ASU, supporting more than 30 principal investigators on over 100 research proposals, and spent five years as a project manager in New York and Shanghai. He holds an MS in Business Analytics from Fordham University and a BA in Advertising from Wenzhou University.
AI for education
Identity & inclusion in engineering
Yao, H.*, Xu, W.*, Turnau, J., Kellam, N., & Wei, H. (2026). Instructional Agents: Reducing teaching faculty workload through multi-agent instructional design. Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2026), Long Papers, 4087–4109. Oral presentation. *Equal contribution. https://aclanthology.org/2026.eacl-long.191/
Kellam, N. N., Xu, W., Palacio, C. R., Suleman, M., & Castillo, A. L. (2026). Futures as pedagogy: Africanfuturism, ungrading, and critical AI literacy for developing entrepreneurial mindset in engineering science. 2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition.
Hong, Y., Yao, H., Shen, B., Xu, W., Wei, H., & Dong, Y. (2026). From rubrics to reliable scores: Evidence-grounded text evaluation with LLM judges. Proceedings of EMNLP 2026 (Main Conference). https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08654
Luo, Z., Kutralingam, T. P., Okoani, O. N., Xu, W., Wei, H., & Hu, X. (2026). Lost in execution: On the multilingual robustness of tool calling in large language models. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026), Long Papers, 44059–44077. https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.2039/
Igo, J., Yao, H., Xu, W., Kellam, N., & Wei, H. (2026). From course concept to lecture video: An AI-powered system for automated MOOC development. Proceedings of the Learning Engineering Research Network Convening (LERN 2026). https://doi.org/10.59668/2551.25409
Xu, W., & Kellam, N. N. (2025). WIP: Exploring the mental health challenges of Asian LGBTQIA+ students in engineering. 2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition. https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--57413
Courses
2026 Fall
| Course Number | Course Title |
|---|---|
| ASU 101-EGR | The ASU Experience |
2025 Fall
| Course Number | Course Title |
|---|---|
| FSE 100 | Introduction to Engineering |
| FSE 100 | Introduction to Engineering |
“You All Belong Here.”
This is the first slide I show on the first day of FSE 100. Whether that message is present shapes the atmosphere of a class, and I want first-year engineering students to begin their journey believing that engineering is built on kindness and support.
Harshness and micromanagement are passed down. Many people never received enough kindness while learning or working; instead they kept hearing “your math is not good enough” or “you do not belong here,” and came to believe that harshness is simply part of engineering. As an instructor, I try to break that cycle by giving young engineers respect and support from the very beginning, so that as they grow they choose to pass kindness on.