Curriculum Vitae
General Information
| Full Name | Mellon Meilong Zhang |
| Current Position | Ph.D. student in Machine Learning, Georgia Institute of Technology |
| Affiliation | Trustworthy Robotics Lab, Georgia Institute of Technology |
| Location | Atlanta, Georgia, USA |
| Citizenship | United States |
| meilongz [at] gatech [dot] edu | |
| Phone | +1-858-229-9859 |
Online
Research Interests
My research focuses on enabling reliable real-world deployment of perception-driven robotic systems and foundation models. I am interested in improving the real-time reactivity, scalability, and generalizability of end-to-end (E2E) networks and vision-language-action (VLA) models for robotics and autonomous driving.
Education
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2025 – 2028
Georgia Institute of Technology - Ph.D. in Machine Learning
- Advised by Prof. Glen Chou
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2023 – 2025
Georgia Institute of Technology - M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering
- Advised by Prof. Saibal Mukhopadhyay
- Transferred to Ph.D. program in 2025
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2019 – 2023
University of California, Berkeley - B.A. in Computer Science
Research Experience
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2025 – Present
Graduate Research Assistant, Trustworthy Robotics Lab
- Advisor: Prof. Glen Chou
- Topics: VLA models, autonomous driving, active uncertainty mitigation.
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2023 – 2025
Graduate Research Assistant, Gigascale Reliable Energy-Efficient Nanosystem Lab
- Advisor: Prof. Saibal Mukhopadhyay
- Topics: Efficient LiDAR perception.
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2021 – 2023
Undergraduate Research Assistant, Knight Lab
- Advisor: Prof. Robert Knight
- Topics: LLM interpretability.
Honors and Awards
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WACV 2026 Travel Grant Award, Dec 2025
Travel Award for participation in WACV 2026 to present and disseminate research. -
Lambda Labs Research Grant, Jul 2025
Compute funding for research on active uncertainty mitigation in autonomous driving. -
UC Berkeley Rose Hills Fellowship, May 2022
Merit-based fellowship for independent summer research funding. One of 45 campus-wide recipients. -
Georgia Tech SURE Fellowship, May 2021
Competitive summer research fellowship. One of 50 recipients selected nationally.
Teaching Experience
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Spring 2026
Graduate Teaching Assistant, Machine Learning in Computational Biology
- Graduate level machine learning class CSE7850: Machine Learning in Computational Biology at Georgia Tech
- Taught by Prof. Yunan Luo
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Fall 2025
Graduate Teaching Assistant, Introduction to Experimental Methods in Aerospace
- Undergraduate level introduction to aerospace engineering class AE2610: Introduction to Experimental Methods in Aerospace at Georgia Tech
- Taught by Prof. Graeme Kennedy and Prof. Jechiel Jagoda
Service
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Program Committee
Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL '25), Workshop on Deep Generative Model in Machine Learning: Theory, Principle and Efficacy (DeLTa @ ICLR '26). -
Project ENGAGES
Mentor for Atlanta-area high school student researchers, 2025–2026. -
Computer Science Mentors (CSM), UC Berkeley
Tutor for CS61B: Data Structures, 2020–2022.
Skills
Programming
Python (PyTorch, TensorFlow, Scikit-learn), C++, CUDA, LaTeX, Java, JavaScript, C, RISC-V.
Development
Linux, bash, Git, SLURM, HPC clusters.