Haozhe Zhang

Modeling Engineer at Tesla · LLMs & Physics-based ML

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Palo Alto, CA

USA

Hey, welcome to my page! đź‘‹

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 — all self-taught.

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.

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

news

May 11, 2026 Our new paper “BenchCAD: A Comprehensive, Industry-Standard Benchmark for Programmatic CAD” is now on arXiv. arXiv:2605.10865.
Mar 24, 2026 Our paper “CADLoop: An Equivariant-Aware Skill-Grounded Loop for CAD Data Curation” has been accepted at NeXD 2026.
Nov 30, 2025 Voice agent for stocks — prototype is up.
Nov 10, 2025 Started building a personal voice agent for stock trading and news — implementation in news_agent.
Aug 15, 2025 Our paper “A buckling mechanics model for pattern transformation of lattice superstructures assembled by soft-hard materials integrated units” has been published in ACS Applied Polymer Materials.
Apr 23, 2025 Our paper “Degradation of Hydrogen Bonds Enormously Enhances Convective Heat Transfer in Nanofluidics” has been published in Nano Letters. Read it here.
Sep 20, 2024 Our paper “Extremely durable electrical impedance tomography–based soft and ultrathin wearable e-skin for three-dimensional tactile interfaces” has been published in Science Advances. Read it here.
Feb 10, 2023 Our paper “Mechanical Janus Structures by Soft–Hard Material Integration” has been published featured as inside cover. Here is the link.
Nov 10, 2022 Our paper “Soft-hard material integration enabled programmable robotic locomotion” has been published on Applied Physics Letter. Here is the link.