Welcome to my personal website! Now I am a software engineer at Google XR.

I graduated with a PhD degree from Media Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I study neurotechnology under the supervision of Dr. Ed Boyden and Dr. Joseph Jacobson. By developing tools for mapping the biomolecules in the brain, I hoped we could have a deeper understanding the mind. For my PhD, I focused on mapping the transcriptome (a fancy word for “where all the RNA lives”) and connectome (a fancy word for “how the neurons are connected” or “model architecture and weight matrix” if you study ML) across the brains of zebrafish and C. elegans worms. Apparently I made minimal contribution to this field (it is sooooooooo complex). I ended up in Sillion Valley to work on AI for a living. Prior to graduate school, I was a visiting student in Dr. Kay Tye’s lab studying the neural mechanism of social dominance. During that time, I initiated a multi-animal tracking and behavioral analysis project under the supervision of Dr. Cewu Lu and Dr. Nancy Padilla, which contributed to a publication in Nature.

My training in neuroscience shows me the power of eliciting emotion and thoughts with well-designed visual and audio stimuli (especially on mice hahahah) on mice, fish and worm. Film, I beleive is no difference except having the human as the audicne. I have been an film director since 2015, such as Undefined Youth, Memory Cut Pro, My Poetic AlphaFriend, Decode MIT, Robotic Dog Finding me a Girlfriend. Check out this tab to learn my view of the world and personality :-D

At MIT, I founded the MIT Film Makers Assocation in the hope to get my fellow MIT friends interested in expressing themselves and resonating with other souls across space and time. I organized the first MIT AI for filmmaking hackathon , the second iteration and the third iteration. Hundreds of people participated in our hackathon, and we received sponsorship from top-tier startups. I was honored to co-organized the Generative AI for visual arts workshop at CVPR 2024. Learn more at the “Film” tab of this page.

Feel free to contact me if you are interested in learning more, email me at ruihanzhang2015@gmail.com or message me on Instagram(@ruihanzhang2015), or via LinkedIn