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, UCSD).

I develop the computational foundations of intelligent systems, focusing on human-AI knowledge co-evolution for discovery. My research seeks to answer fundamental questions like 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 research philosophy centers on bringing new perspectives to shift existing paradigms or unifying seemingly different paradigms–exemplified by RAP (reasoning as planning), PromptAgent (prompting as search), ToolkenGPT (tools as tokens), or NeurIPS 2025's LAW 2025 workshop (Bridging Language, Agent, and World Models).

I earned my PhD in 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 Agentic AI Research Grant Award, Rising Star in Data Science (UChicago), Best Paper Award at SoCal NLP, Amazon Alexa Prize, etc. I collaborate with MIT-IBM Lab, Microsoft Research, NEC Labs, and academic institutions including CMU, MBZUAI, and several UC campuses through the UC-LEAP project.