Lab Members

Faculty

Ding Zhao

Associate Professor, Mechanical Engineering | Computer Science Department | Robotics Institute | Machine Learning Department | Wilton E. Scott Institute for Energy Innovation

Ding Zhao is the Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. He directs the CMU Safe AI Lab, where his research focuses on trustworthy AI, covering algorithmic, physical, and societal aspects. His work encompasses self-driving technology, household robots, autonomous medical robots, and privacy, fairness, and cybersecurity of autonomy. He has been actively working with world-renowned industrial partners including Google Deepmind, Amazon, Microsoft, Ford, Uber, IBM, Adobe, Bosch, Toyota, and Rolls-Royce. He also collaborates with leading healthcare providers including Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. He is endowed as the Dean's Early Career Fellow (2023-2025). From 2022 to 2023, he served as a visiting researcher with the robotic team at Google DeepMind. Ding Zhao has received numerous awards, including the George N. Saridis Best Transactions Paper Award from IEEE, the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, George Tallman Ladd Research Award, MIT Technology Review 35 under 35 Award in China, Ford University Collaboration Award, Qualcomm Innovation Award, Carnegie-Bosch Research Award, Struminger Teaching Award, and various industrial fellowship awards from Google DeepMind, Adobe, Toyota, and Bosch. His work has garnered attention from media outlets like the New York Times, TIME, Telegraph, and Wired.

Professor Zhao got his PhD from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He was fortuantely to be advised by Professor Huei Peng.

Current Members

Xingyu Liu

Postdoctoral Research Associate

Research interests: Embodied AI, Robotics, Computer Vision

Email: xingyul3@andrew.cmu.edu

Mengdi Xu

PhD student

Research interests: Robotics, artificial intelligence, cognitive science

Email: mengdixu@andrew.cmu.edu

Wenhao Ding

PhD student

Research interests: , Controllable generative models, adversarial robustness, causal reinforcement learning

Email: wenhaod@andrew.cmu.edu

Zuxin Liu

PhD student

Research interests: Robotics, robot learning, reinforcement learning, AI safety

Email: zuxinl@andrew.cmu.edu

Peide Huang

PhD student

Research interests: Multi-agent system, AI safety, robotics learning

Email: peideh@andrew.cmu.edu

Zhepeng Cen

PhD student

Research interests: AI safety, reinforcement learning, neural processes

Email: zcen@andrew.cmu.edu

Diana Gomez

PhD student

Research interests: Decision making, equity/fairness

Haohong Lin

PhD student

Research interests: Knowledge-guided generation, generalizable RL

Email: haohongl@andrew.cmu.edu

Yaru Niu

PhD student

Research interests: Robot learning, multi-agent system, reinforcement learning, AI safety

Email: yarun@andrew.cmu.edu

Miao Li

PhD student

Research interests: Privacy-aware Learning

Email: limiao@andrew.cmu.edu

Yihang Yao

PhD student

Research interests: Safe Reinforcement Learning, Robot Learning

Email: yihangya@andrew.cmu.edu

Yuyou Zhang

PhD student

Research interests: Surgery robots, modular robots

Email: yuyouz@andrew.cmu.edu

William Jongwon Han

PhD student

Research interests: AI embodiement, Brain Machine Interaction

Email: wjhan@andrew.cmu.edu

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Changyi Lin

PhD student

Hassan Azmat

Master's student

Research interests: Autonomous vehicle ventures

Yihan He

Master student

Research interests: Motion planning, Trajectory prediction

Email: yihanhe@andrew.cmu.edu

Sameer Bharadwaj

Master student

Research interests: Perception

Past Members

My goal in the next 10 years is to cultivate 10 professors in my lab, train 100 engineers and leaders with real world projects, and educate 1000 students in the classroom, in the direction of AI-enabled robotics.

PhDs

Mansur Arief

Postdoc at Stanford with Mykel Kochenderfer

Research interests: Rare event simulation, statistical machine learning, autonomous vehicles, transportation systems

Dissertation: Certifiable Evaluation for Safe Intelligent Autonomy.

Email: marief@andrew.cmu.edu

Jiacheng Zhu

Postdoc at MIT with Justin Solomon

Research interests: Probabilistic graphical models, representation learning, Robotics

Dissertation: Generalizable Machine Learning on Heterogeneous Domains.

Email: jiachzhu@umich.edu

High school summer visitors

  • Shang Wang, undergraduate, Harvard University

Undergraduate summer visitors

  • Akhil Agnihotri, PhD student, University of Southern California
  • Beverley-Claire Okogwu, MS, Carnegi Mellon University
  • Keegan Harris PhD student, Carnegie Mellon University
  • Chaojian Li, PhD student, Rice University
  • Eric Ma, PhD student, Georgia Institute of Technology
  • Zhaobin Mo, PhD student, Columbia University
  • Xinpeng Wang, PhD student, University of Michigan

Masters

  • Macheng Shen, PhD student, MIT
  • Huajing Zhao, PhD student, UCLA
  • Yaohui Guo, PhD student, University of Michigan
  • Zhaolun Su, Waymo
  • Xiaoshu Liu, Nvidia
  • Shenyu Mou, Apple
  • Hanqing Liu, Waymo
  • Zifeng Peng, General Motors
  • Peiyan Gong, Toyota Research Institute
  • Ted Xiao, Ford
  • Xinzhi Fan, Embark
  • Ashish Sajwan, Aptiv
  • Sisi Li, WeRide.ai
  • Weilun Peng, Pony.ai
  • Aditya Ramesh, Cisco
  • Yao (Melody) Zhao, VMWare
  • Liliang Wang, PhD student, University of Michigan
  • Rui Chen, PhD student, Carnegie Mellon University
  • Vinay Varma Kalidindi, Volvo (Zenuity)
  • Manoj Bhat, Qualcomm
  • Ashish Roongta, MathWorks
  • Boxian Deng, Facebook
  • Krishna Dave, Apple
  • Zi Li, Plus.AI, Inc.
  • Minjun Xu, Akuna Capital
  • Jiayi Wang, Amazon
  • Yidong He, NVIDIA
  • Guilin Zhang, Google
  • Hongyi Zhou, DeepRoute
  • Haoliang Jiang, ANSYS
  • Congtao Kuang, Google
  • Yugant Rana, Google
  • Jiayi Xia, Zoox
  • Kartik Sah, Zoox

Postdoc

  • Wenshuo Wang, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of California, Berkeley
  • Yan Chang, Lyft
  • Xun Gong, Assistant Prof, School of Artificial Intelligence, Jilin University
  • Zhiyuan Huang, Assistant Prof, Tongji University