Zhen Wang 王震

Hi! I'm Zhen, currently a Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow hosted at UC San Diego. My postdoc mentors are Profs. Eric Xing (CMU & MBZUAI) and Zhiting Hu (HDSI & CSE, UCSD).

I am interested in building the foundations of general-purpose knowledge and reasoning systems that learn to acquire knowledge and reason to discover at scientist-level efficiency and extrapolation, with reliability, and that collaborate with humans across interdisciplinary and scientific domains.

To this end, my research seeks to answer fundamental questions: How do models represent knowledge for discovery? How do they reason and plan to extrapolate? How do they reliably collaborate and co-discover with humans? My philosophy centers on bringing new perspectives to shift existing paradigms or unifying seemingly different ones—exemplified by LLM Reasoners (reasoning as planning), PromptAgent (prompting as search), ToolkenGPT (tools as tokens), and the LAW 2025 workshop at NeurIPS (bridging language, agent, and world models).

I earned my PhD from the Computer Science department at The Ohio State University, advised by Prof. Huan Sun, where I developed foundational frameworks for knowledge-centric AI systems. My work has been supported by and recognized with the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Fellowship, OpenAI Research Grant, Rising Star in Data Science (UChicago), Best Paper Award at SoCal NLP, Amazon Alexa Prize, and more. I collaborate with MIT-IBM Lab, Microsoft Research, NEC Labs, and academic institutions including CMU, MBZUAI, and multiple UC campuses and national labs through the UC-LEAP project.