People — AID Lab, University of Rochester

Yuanzhao Zhang

Yuanzhao is drawn to systems that are complex enough to surprise you, yet simple enough to understand — coupled oscillators, neural networks, and the territory in between. He earned his Ph.D. in physics from Northwestern in 2020 with Adilson Motter, then held a Schmidt Science Fellowship at Cornell with Steven Strogatz and an Omidyar Fellowship at the Santa Fe Institute before joining the University of Rochester in 2026. He likes problems that sit on the boundary between fields and explanations simple enough to sketch on a napkin.