Summary
Yifan Zhang is a PhD student and Graduate Fellow at Princeton University focused on building scalable, high-capability large language models. With eight years of experience across academia and industry, he has held research roles at Tsinghua, UCLA, and a Seed LLM internship at ByteDance working on pretraining and scaling. His work blends rigorous ML theory from an MPhil and BS in Math & CS with hands-on systems practice in model training and optimization. Based in the New York City area, he brings cross-institutional collaboration experience and a track record of moving research into large-scale experimental settings. Notably, Yifan transitioned between top research labs internationally, signaling both adaptability and a strong network across the AI research community.
8 years of coding experience
3 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science - BS Mathematics and Computer Science, Bachelor of Science - BS Mathematics and Computer Science at Peking University
Master of Philosophy - MPhil Computer Science, Master of Philosophy - MPhil Computer Science at Tsinghua University
University of California, Los Angeles
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Machine Learning, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Machine Learning at Princeton University