Zhao Zhang

Dr. Zhao Zhang is an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Rutgers University. His research is to design algorithms and computer systems to facilitate and expedite scientific discovery. His recent focus is on fast and scalable large foundation model training at extreme scale and the application of machine learning and deep learning methods in science and engineering. Dr. Zhang has done a series of research on optimization with large-batch size, second-order information, and sparse gradients. He has also collaborated with neural scientists and structure biologists to apply deep learning methods. Dr. Zhang leads the NSF-funded Diamond project and the hpcGPT project. He co-leads the cyberinfrastructure for artificial intelligence (CI4AI) thrust in the NSF ICICLE AI institute. Dr. Zhang also co-leads the model pretraining runtime research thrust in the Trillion Parameter Consortium (TPC). PI Zhang is the recipient of NSF CAREER award in 2024, and a DOE INCITE award (200,000 node hours in 2024 and 2025) on ALCF Polaris.

Dr. Zhang joined Rutgers ECE in 2023. Prior to that, he was a computer scientist at Texas Advanced Computing Center, where he led the machine learning group. Dr. Zhang was a postdoc researcher at AMPLab and Berkeley Institute for Data Science, University of California, Berkeley from 2014-2016. He completed his Ph.D in the department of computer science at University of Chicago in 2014.