Charles Zhang

PhD Student at Harvard University

About

I'm a 2nd year Computer Science PhD student in the Pehlevan Group at Harvard University, interested in artificial intelligence and neuroscience. I was previously a post-bacc researcher in the Ölveczky Lab, where I used deep reinforcement learning and robot learning methods to model rodent motor control. I did my undergrad at UMass Amherst, where I majored in Computer Science and minored in Philosophy.

I'm interested in understanding embodied intelligence in biological systems through computation and using these insights to build better AI.

News

September 2026: "A latent control model for realistic rodent motion" was accepted to NeurIPS 2026!
March 2026: I'm presenting a poster at COSYNE 2026 titled "MIMIC-MJX: Neuromechanical imitation of animal behavior enables flexible models of embodied control"!
November 2025: Preprint is out for MIMIC-MJX! Project page here
August 2025: I'm starting a PhD in Computer Science at Harvard!
March 2025: I presented a poster at COSYNE 2025 titled "A GPU-Accelerated Pipeline for Imitating Animal Motor Control"!

Publications

A Latent Control Model for Realistic Rodent Motion

Aidan Sirbu, Charles Y. Zhang, Yuanjia Yang, Bence P. Ölveczky, Talmo D. Pereira, Blake A. Richards

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2026

MIMIC-MJX: Neuromechanical Emulation of Animal Behavior

Charles Y. Zhang*, Yuanjia Yang*, Aidan Sirbu, Elliott T.T. Abe, Emil Wärnberg, Eric J. Leonardis, Diego E. Aldarondo, Adam Lee, Aaditya Prasad, Jason Foat, Kaiwen Bian, Joshua Park, Rusham Bhatt, Hutton Saunders, Akira Nagamori, Ayesha R. Thanawalla, Kee Wui Huang, Fabian Plum, Hendrik K. Beck, Steven W. Flavell, David Labonte, Blake A. Richards, Bingni W. Brunton, Eiman Azim, Bence P. Ölveczky, Talmo D. Pereira

arXiv preprint, 2025; under review

arXiv Project Page

Contact

charleszhang[at]fas[dot]harvard[dot]edu