Zhen Wang 王震
Hi! I am an incoming Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at The University of Texas at Arlington.
Before UTA, I was a Moore Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at UC San Diego, working with Eric Xing and Zhiting Hu; I received my PhD from The Ohio State University, working with Huan Sun and Yu Su.
My work has been supported by and recognized with the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Fellowship, OpenAI Research Grant (sole-PI, 1 of 11 teams worldwide), Rising Star in Data Science (UChicago), Best Paper Award at SoCal NLP, Amazon Alexa Prize Winner (proposal and team leader), and more. I have led collaborations with MIT-IBM Lab, Microsoft Research, NEC Labs, and academic institutions including CMU, MBZUAI, five UC campuses and three national labs through the UC-LEAP project.
Research Overview View Details →
My research focuses on the foundations of reasoning, planning, and agency in AI, and applies them to accelerate and democratize knowledge and scientific discovery. I aim to build AI systems that can autonomously reason, act, and discover, and am interested in deploying them as AI co-scientists that can speed up research across biology, materials science, social science, and beyond. My recent works explore:
- Deliberative Reasoning & World Models (EMNLP'23, COLM'24, ACL'23, EMNLP'24, ICLR'26)
- Autonomous Agents & Trustworthy Deployment (NeurIPS'25, ICLR'24, Amazon Alexa Prize, FIRE-Bench, ICML'26)
- Compositional & Self-specializing Foundation Models (ICLR'23, ICLR'25, NeurIPS'23 Oral)
- Scientific FMs and AI Co-scientists for Discovery (NeurIPS'25, Nature'25, Cancer Discovery'26 (IF: 33.3), UC-LEAP Grant)
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Miscellaneous
Outside of research, you'll likely find me hiking, playing pickleball, or planning my next adventure in national parks. I'm a passionate sports fan, cheering for the Buckeyes, Dodgers, and Inter Miami.
Reading is also my main way of thinking outside of code and experiments. I enjoy essays, literary fiction, science fiction, and books on philosophy and ideas. Recently I've been reading 许知远的《伯克利的魔山》, The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, and George Zarkadakis's In Our Own Image, among others.