Research
My research interest changes from time to time, but here are some of my current ones. My research interests always come from my curiousity.
AI 4 Science
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Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing our world. From LLMs like ChatGPT and ChatGLM to LVMs (CLIP, DINO, ViT) and image generative models (Stable Diffusion, Sora, kling), development of AI is bringing a potential ground-breaking change to the way we live and work. The fundamental building block of all these AI models is the neural network (NN), which by ingenious design can potentially fit any complex function such as distribution of natural language and image pixels. In science, we encounter many of these complex functions that humans are impossible to analytically derive. AI, by taking in substantial amount of data, can help us to fit these complex functions and tell us what is essential.
Publications
Z. Zhang et al., Recognizing and generating knotted molecular structures by machine learning, arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.12780 (submitted)
Active Matter Simulation and Theory
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Active matter is defined as a system of individual dynamic objects that have ability to move in phase space by dissipating inherent energy or energy extracted from surrounding environment. You can find some detailed reference here. To strip down all those technical and arcane phrases, active matter is a group of stuffs that use their own energy to move around (consider a flock of birds swarm across the sky). Most interestingly, when these individuals move collectively, they exhibit a variety of fascinating patterns called Motility Induced Phase Separations (MIPS). My interest is to use physical and mathematical models to simulate active matter systems. This helps me to gain insights into what interactions, symmetries, and thermodynamic properties are crucial to be captured in order to understand the mechanism behind the active matter systems. Codes can be found in the Project page.
Publications
Z. Zhang et al., Activity tightens polymer knots, 2025 (prepare to resubmit)
Experiments on Bacteria
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Bacteria are one of the most accessible active matter systems you could ever find in the world. Also, they play important roles in human's world, from health concerns to food productions. To test different dynamic properties of bacteria in the lab setting is one of the important way to understand them and hopefully gain insights into general laws that could be extended to other active matter system as well.
Publications
Z. Zhang et al., Enterobacter sp. strain SM1_HS2B manifests transient elongation and swimming motility in liquid medium, Microbiology Spectrum, 2022 Jun 1:e0207821. doi:10.1128/spectrum.02078-21.
