I am on the 2026–27 academic and industry job market.
About
I am a final-year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Southern California, advised by Professor Jernej Barbič. Before USC, I earned my B.Sc. in Mathematics from the School of the Gifted Young at the University of Science and Technology of China, graduating with honors from the Loo-Keung Hua Mathematics Talents Class.
My research is interpretable physical AI: models of the physical world whose parts are written in the language of physics, so we can read, check and improve what they learn. I work on computational mechanics for soft and thin objects (elastic solids, shells and rods, nonlinear materials, frictional contact, differentiable simulation) and on measuring material laws from real specimens. My work has appeared in ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH / SIGGRAPH Asia) and Computer Graphics Forum (SCA).
In industry, I have worked on humanoid-robot simulation at Tesla Optimus, haptics and grasping at Meta Reality Labs, and real-time physics at Tencent.
News
- Dec 2026“Beyond Kirchhoff–Love: A Volumetric Approach to Thin-Shell Mechanics” will be presented at SIGGRAPH Asia 2026 (ACM Transactions on Graphics).
- Oct 2026Guest lecture at UCLA (MATH 285J): Isotropic Distortion Energies — slides & code.
- Oct 2026Ph.D. thesis proposal: “Stretch-Based Elasticity: Simulation of Solids, Shells, and Rods and Inverse Material Modeling.”
- Jul 2026Jernej Barbič received the Best Presentation Award at the Symposium on Computer Animation (SCA 2026) for presenting our paper “Weak Nonlinearity and Linear Equalization for Isotropic Hyperelastic Materials.”
- Summer 2026Robotics intern at Tesla Optimus, working on contact computation in the humanoid physics engine.
Research at a glance
