Photo of Hongan Zhu
Universal Studios Beijing
October 27, 2023

Hongan Zhu

I live in Boston, Massachusetts.

I'm a first-year PhD student in Industrial Engineering at Northeastern University, where I'm part of the MAGICS Lab. My research mainly looks at using large language models to simulate human behavior, and what those simulations reveal about the models themselves. I've also worked on agent-based models of group behavior in the past. Before my PhD, I did my master's in operations research at Northeastern and my bachelor's in philosophy at NYU.

I like making things run faster, feel more intuitive, and have less friction.

I occasionally compete on Kaggle and have won two gold medals so far, placing 4th in the 2026 NeuroGolf Championship and 9th in Stanford RNA 3D Folding Part 2.

You can find me on X, GitHub, Kaggle, LinkedIn, and Google Scholar, or reach me via email.

Papers

Writing