Zihao Yu 于子皓

I come from Shijiazhuang, Hebei, China, and came to the U.S. for college. I began my undergraduate studies in 2020 and finished my B.A. in Physics at Grinnell College in 2023, where I was fortunate to be advised by Prof. Keisuke Hasegawa, mentored by Prof. Charles Cunningham, and inspired by every professor I learned from at Grinnell. In Spring 2023, when ChatGPT-3.5 was released, I became fascinated by AI and was accepted into the WashU Dual Degree Program to continue my undergraduate education in Engineering.

At WashU, I studied classical engineering fundamentals while also exploring the frontiers of artificial intelligence. I earned my second and third undergraduate degrees in B.S. in Computer Engineering and B.S. in Electrical Engineering (with a minor in Robotics). I was fortunate to be advised by Prof. Roger Chamberlain and mentored by Prof. Jason Trobaugh. I then spent one more year at WashU to complete the M.S. in Computer Science program.

During my time at WashU, I also had the opportunity to extend my research beyond academia into real-world robotic systems. In the summer of 2025, I joined Tencent Robotics X Lab for my first internship, where I worked on embodied AI and intelligent robotic systems. The experience gave me a new perspective on research—how ideas in embodied intelligence can be translated into systems that operate reliably in complex physical environments and ultimately become useful in people’s everyday lives.