Haozhe Zhang

Hey, welcome to my page! 👋

I’m a modeling engineer at Tesla, working at the intersection of physics-based modeling and machine learning for next-generation battery cells — theoretical and computational modeling, reinforcement learning for automation, and data-driven optimization at scale-up.

My background is heavy on physics. I’ve spent years working out closed-form theoretical solutions across mechanics and multi-physics fields — soft-hard material integration, stretchable metasurfaces, mechanical Janus structures, nanoconfined fluid mechanics. I pair the theory with hands-on engineering, so most of what I’ve built has gone end-to-end from the math to a working system.

Outside the day job, what pulls me from one thing to the next is curiosity and a long-running urge to build new things. I keep gravitating toward LLMs, agentic systems, RL training infrastructure, voice agents for narrow domains, and AI for hardware. One of those turned into a project worth pointing at:

BenchCAD — a multimodal benchmark for programmatic CAD, the entrance to AI for hardware. A model sees four orthographic views of an industrial part and has to write the CadQuery program that rebuilds it; we score the re-executed geometry. 17,900 execution-verified parts across 106 industrial families, half of them anchored to real ISO / DIN / EN / ASME / IEC specification tables rather than free-form shapes. Both frontier labs now report it on their flagship models — Anthropic in three Claude system cards (Fable 5 / Mythos 5, Sonnet 5, Opus 5) and OpenAI in the GPT-5.6 launch table, next to OSWorld and BrowseComp. When both labs race the same benchmark and publish the gains themselves, AI for hardware has become a strategic front. benchcad.com · arXiv:2605.10865 Before Tesla, I earned my PhD in mechanical engineering from the University of Virginia and a BS from the University of Science and Technology of China. My doctoral work centered on theoretical and computational modeling of multi-physics fields.

In my spare time, I enjoy traveling and playing Leagues.