2025 Amazon AI PhD Fellows
“UCLA is excited to join Amazon’s AI PhD Fellowship program with 15 outstanding doctoral students across seven engineering departments,” said Ah-Hyung “Alissa” Park, the Ronald and Valerie Sugar Dean of the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering. “This transformative support, along with our ongoing partnership through the Science Hub for Humanity and Artificial Intelligence, will empower our students and faculty members to drive groundbreaking innovations in AI that benefit society.”
Arturo Moises Flores Alvarez
ADVISOR: Dennis Hong
Mechanical Engineering
My research focuses on developing generalist motor control policies for humanoid robots using reinforcement and imitation learning, with an emphasis on locomotion. I combine model-based and learning-based methods to achieve robust and adaptable controllers across diverse robot embodiments, later extending to loco-manipulation.
Lucas Bandarkar
ADVISOR: Nanyun Peng
Computer Science
My research interests are in multilingual natural language processing (NLP). In particular, I am interested in the interpretability of cross-lingual representations and modularity in LLMs.
Yihang Chen
ADVISOR: Cho-Jui Hsieh
Computer Science
My research interest lies in the trustworthy and efficient multimodal understanding and reasoning. I am specifically interested in using the model’s intrinsic signals to either safeguard the model against adversaries or enhance the model’s reasoning ability.
Hossein Khalili
ADVISOR: Nader Sehatbakhsh
Electrical and Computer Engineering
My research focuses on security and privacy in machine learning; developing defenses against adversarial attacks on vision and language models, protecting privacy in LLMs, and securing intelligent robotic systems powered by LLMs and VLMs to ensure safe, private, and trustworthy real-world AI behavior.
Arthur Khodaverdian
ADVISOR: Panagiotis Christofides
Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
I enjoy process control and simulation. My current work is with neural networks in this context, and I plan to continue to work with neural networks.
Jeong Min Kong
ADVISOR: Ian P. Roberts
Electrical and Computer Engineering
My main research centers on advancing the foundations of deep learning, including deep continual learning, biologically inspired neural networks, and autonomous coordination and efficient communication protocols for multi-agent systems. I also have a strong interest in using machine learning to solve complex problems arising in LEO satellite communication systems.
Yunfan Li
ADVISOR: Lin Yang
Electrical and Computer Engineering
My research focuses on reinforcement learning and optimization, developing theoretically grounded algorithms that align agents with long-term behaviors without explicit reward design, emphasizing efficiency, robustness, and interpretability.
Yannah J.U. Melle
ADVISOR: Daniel Schwalbe-Koda
Materials Science and Engineering
My research focuses on modeling spectroscopic data of complex liquid-phase mixtures using molecular simulations, machine learning, and thermodynamic principles to develop algorithms for automated compound identification and scalable chemical analysis.
Sicheng Mo
ADVISOR: Bolei Zhou
Computer Science
My research interests lie in unified generative modeling across image, video, and multimodal domains. I am particularly interested in developing controllable world models with reasoning capabilities and exploring efficient training methods for large-scale generative models through representation learning.
Yixin Elaine Wan
ADVISOR: Kai-Wei Chang
Computer Science
My major research interest has been on building Trustworthy Multimodal Generative Models.
Yuntian Wang
ADVISOR: Aydogan Ozcan
Electrical and Computer Engineering
I use deep learning to engineer intelligent diffractive optical systems, enabling computation at the physical layer for significant gains in speed and efficiency. My research also extends to AI security, where I investigate the vulnerabilities of models through digital and physical adversarial attacks.
Chenchen Ye
ADVISOR: Wei Wang
Computer Science
My research focuses on developing LLM agents capable of solving complex problems, with emphasis on evaluation, data, and post-training. I am currently exploring methods to enhance software engineering agents through multi-agent framework and test-time scaling strategies.
Beril Alyuz Yilmaz
ADVISOR: Debiao Li
Bioengineering
My research interests include deep learning and computer vision for fast, high-fidelity MRI reconstruction and synthesis; quantitative imaging; and generalizable models across scanners, protocols, anatomies, and disease states via domain adaptation, multi-task learning, semi- and self-supervised, and physics-informed methods.
Shan Yu
ADVISOR: Harry Xu
Computer Science
My primary research interests lie in machine learning systems, particularly in designing and building high-performance, elastic, and cost-efficient infrastructures for large language model serving and other ML applications, optimizing scalability, latency, and resource utilization.
Zewei Zhou
ADVISOR: Jiaqi Ma
Civil Engineering
My research focuses on the scene understanding and reasoning of autonomous systems, which enables vehicles/robots to intelligently interact and cooperate with others. These areas are essential for enhancing the safety, efficiency, and generalization of physical AI agents.