About

“To give anything less than your best is to sacrifice the gift”
— Steve Prefontaine

I am Yuandong Zhang, a graduate student studying Computer Science at UC San Diego.

To me, computer science is a craft—like carpentry—something to learn, refine, and ultimately apply to tackle the problems we care about, from the smallest everyday choices to the grand questions of our planet.

I study how AI can understand, predict, and optimize human-environment systems, bridging mobility, climate, and social behavior.

More specifically, I'm interested in questions like: how do humans move? how does El Niño evolve? and how do LLMs communicate?

My approach to these problems usually involves mining large-scale data, designing the right computational models, and validating them with end-to-end systems.

  • M.S. in Computer Science, UCSD, 2025-2027
  • B.S. in Computer Science, DUKE&DKU, 2021-2025
Large Language Model Natural Language Processing Applied ML Spatiotemporal Modelling