About
Xian Zhang is a part-time lecturer in University of Michigan’s Statistics Department and is also a full-time senior software engineer II in self-driving industry, building data and model solutions for ML-driven planning. Xian earned her undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering from UM-SJTU JI, where she enjoyed being a participant in the student advisor program. She earned an M.S in Computational Mechanics from Columbia and a Ph.D. in TAM (with a minor in Statistics) with a concentration on stochastic dynamics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. During her time there, she served as social chair, academic vice president, and lecturer in the graduate MechSE Society and engineering graduate student advisory committee. Her interests include optimization, stochastic dynamics, autonomous mobility, and general software management. Xian's objective as a lecturer is to introduce simple yet useful computational tools that are widely used in industry and to encourage students to pursue their highest ambitions and interests. In her free time, she enjoys spending time with her family and her cat Fay, reading, visiting museums, dancing (a recent passion) and doing pilates.
