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
Email 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 work across three areas: real-time inference and latency coordination, world modeling and spatiotemporal reasoning, and closed-loop uncertainty-aware perception–action systems. My current interests include end-to-end (E2E) networks and vision-language-action (VLA) models for robotics and autonomous driving.

Education

  • 2023 – Present
    Georgia Institute of Technology - Ph.D. in Machine Learning
    • Advised by Prof. Glen Chou
  • 2019 – 2023
    University of California, Berkeley - B.A. in Computer Science

Research Experience

  • 2025 – Present
    Graduate Research Assistant, Trustworthy Robotics Lab
    • Advisor: Prof. Glen Chou
    • Topics: VLA models, autonomous driving, active uncertainty mitigation.
  • 2023 – 2025
    Graduate Research Assistant, Gigascale Reliable Energy-Efficient Nanosystem Lab
    • Advisor: Prof. Saibal Mukhopadhyay
    • Topics: Efficient LiDAR perception.
  • 2021 – 2023
    Undergraduate Research Assistant, Knight Lab
    • Advisor: Prof. Robert Knight
    • Topics: LLM interpretability.

Honors and Awards

  • 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.

Service and Teaching

  • Teaching
    Graduate Teaching Assistant, AE 2610 Intro Experimental Methods in Aerospace, Fall 2025.
  • Program Committee
    Reviewer, Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) 2025.
  • 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.