Biography

Yanlei Zhang is an Assistant Professor in the School of Computing at Queen’s University, where he leads a research group at the intersection of AI, mathematics, and the natural sciences. His research focuses on developing generative AI and geometric learning methods for modeling the structure and dynamics of complex systems, with applications spanning single-cell biology, neuroscience, and scientific discovery. He is also interested in the theoretical foundations of machine learning and their applications to nanophotonic inverse design, optimizer learning for LLMs, world models, and robotics.

Prior to joining Queen’s University (2022~2026), he was a postdoctoral researcher working with groups at Mila – Quebec AI Institute, Yale University, and Harvard Medical School. During this time, he worked with researchers including Guy Wolf, Smita Krishnaswamy, Yoshua Bengio, Eugene Belilovsky, and Abudayyeh–Gootenberg Lab on problems at the intersection of machine learning, geometry, and the life sciences. He received his PhD in Mathematics from Queen’s University in 2022, where he was supervised by Prof. Andrew Lewis.

Updated: September 8, 2026 2:04 PM