Yucheng Zhang is an assistant researcher at Pengcheng Laboratory (PCL), where he was also a postdoc research fellow. Prior to joining PCL, he earned his PhD in Physics from New York University (NYU) and BS in Applied Physics from University of Science and Technology of China (USTC).

Yucheng’s research interests are at the interface between machine learning, scientific computing, and physics. He is mainly working on developing and optimizing physical modeling at multiscales with differentiable simulation and deep learning. Reconstructing traditional scientific simulations in the state-of-art machine learning libraries like JAX makes these simulations differentiable and optimizable with neural surrogates. He is now mainly focusing on the numerical simulation of cardiac electrophysiology, and he has also been working on cosmological N-body simulation.

Position

• 2024 - Current Assistant Researcher, Pengcheng Laboratory (Shenzhen, China)
• 2022 - 2024 Postdoc Fellow, Pengcheng Laboratory (Shenzhen, China)
• 2018 - 2022 Research Assistant, New York University (New York, China)
• 2018 - 2020 Teaching Assistant, New York University (New York, China)

Education

• 2017 - 2022 New York University (New York, United States)
  • PhD in Physics
  • Received Henry M. MacCracken Fellowship, James Arthur Graduate Award
• 2013 - 2017 University of Science and Technology of China (Hefei, China)
  • BS in Applied Physics

Publications

• A Hamiltonian, post‑Born, three‑dimensional, on‑the‑fly ray tracing algorithm for gravitational lensing
  A Zhou, Y Li, …, Y Zhang et al., J. Cosmol. Astropart. Phys. 10, 069 (2024), arXiv: 2405.12913.
• A New Framework for ISM Emission Line Models: Connecting Multi-Scale Simulations Across Cosmological Volumes
  S Yang, A Lidz, A Benson, Y Zhao, H Li, A Zhao, A Smith, Y Zhang et al. accepted by Astrophys. J., arXiv: 2409.03997.
• The multi‑component fitting to the star formation histories in the TNG simulation
  Y Wang, …, Y Zhang et al., Astrophys. J. 968, 115 (2024), arXiv: 2406.13254.
• Differentiable Cosmological Simulation with Adjoint Method
  Y Li, C Modi, D Jamieson, Y Zhang et al., Astrophys. J. S. 270, 36 (2024), arXiv: 2211.09815.
• Characterizing the Conditional Galaxy Property Distribution using Gaussian Mixture Models
  Y Zhang et al., Astrophys. J. 950, 159 (2023), arXiv: 2302.11166.
• The DESI Survey Validation: Results from Visual Inspection of Bright Galaxies, Luminous Red Galaxies, and Emission‑line Galaxies
  T‑W Lan, …, Y Zhang et al., Astrophys. J. 943, 68 (2023), arXiv: 2208.08516.
• pmwd: A Differentiable Cosmological Particle‑Mesh N‑body Library
  Y Li, L Lu, C Modi, D Jamieson, Y Zhang et al., arXiv: 2211.09958.
• Joint analyses of 2D CMB lensing and 3D galaxy clustering in the spherical Fourier‑Bessel basis
  Y Zhang, A R Pullen and A S Maniyar, Phys. Rev. D 104, 103523 (2021), arXiv: 2110.00872.
• Testing General Relativity on cosmological scales at redshift 𝑧 ∼ 1.5 with quasar and CMB lensing
  Y Zhang, A R Pullen, S Alam et al., MNRAS 501, 1013 (2021), arXiv: 2007.12607.
• The Completed SDSS‑IV extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: Large‑scale Structure Catalogs for Cosmological Analysis
  A J Ross, …, Y Zhang et al., MNRAS 498, 2354 (2020), arXiv: 2007.09000.