CV

Education

Dartmouth College, PhD in Computer Science, Fall 2025 – Present

Advised by Alberto Quattrini Li
Selected coursework: Robot Design, Parallel Opt for Robotics, Robotics Perception Systems

Lafayette College, BS in Computer Science, May 2025

Honors thesis advised by Jeffrey O. Pfaffmann
Selected coursework: Artificial Intelligence, Operating Systems, Programming Languages

X. Zhao, Y. Huang, C. Burgul, M. Jeong, M. Chatzispyrou, I. Rekleitis, and A. Quattrini Li, "EchoSplat: Sonar Initialized and Restored Gaussian Splatting for Underwater Reconstruction," 2027 IEEE International Conference on Robotics & Automation (ICRA). (Under Review)
M. Jeong, Y. Huang, X. Zhao, Y. Jiang, A. Zhang, A. Puninchittaya, P. Udayakumar, J. Hannan, and A. Quattrini Li, "CoDock: Coordinated Docking of Autonomous Surface Vehicles with an Active Station of Disturbance Awareness," 2027 IEEE International Conference on Robotics & Automation (ICRA). (Under Review)
C. Burgul, X. Zhao, Y. Huang, M. Chatzispyrou, A. Quattrini Li, and I. Rekleitis, "SVIn+: Multi-Modal Framework for Robust Underwater State Estimation using 3D Sonar, Visual-Inertial, Water-Pressure, and DVL," IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2026.
J. Yu, N. Shao, J. Yang, L. Yang, K. Hong, Y. Chen, X. Zhao, H. Yu, T. Zhang, and J. Dong, "Ultrafine Garlic Powder Alleviates Non-Alcoholic Steatohepatitis by Inhibiting Hepatocyte Ferroptosis and Modulating ERK-Dependent Oxidative Stress," Frontiers in Pharmacology, vol. 16, 2025.

Marine Robotics and Multi-Sensor Perception, Dartmouth Reality and Robotics Lab — Oct 2025 – Present

Building a ROS-based underwater data acquisition system integrating Spinnaker cameras, 3D sonar, IMU, and depth sensors, under the supervision of Dr. Yewei Huang and Prof. Alberto Quattrini Li

ProcessGPT: Domain-Specific Language Models for CS Education, Honors Thesis, Lafayette College — May 2024 – May 2025

Developed and fine-tuned GPT-Neo architectures (12M–33M parameters) specialized for Processing programming-language instruction, achieving 9.2/10 similarity scores on domain-specific benchmarks
Implemented transformer-based models with custom tokenization, gradient accumulation (16 steps), and cosine-annealing learning-rate schedules on a curated dataset
Conducted comparative performance analysis across perplexity, grammar accuracy, and computational efficiency

Computational Biology and Animal Models for NASH Treatment, Research Assistant, Tianjin University — June 2023 – Aug 2025

Collaborated with Prof. Jinrui Dong investigating ferroptosis mechanisms in non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH)
Performed bioinformatics analysis including RNA-seq processing, differential expression analysis, and pathway enrichment using DESeq2 and GSEA

CaveSLAM: Underwater Cave Navigation System — Oct 2025 – Dec 2025

Developed a sonar-adapted LeGO-LOAM variant for 6-DOF underwater localization; implemented EKF multi-sensor fusion with sonar odometry, IMU, and depth sensors, reducing vertical drift
Designed TTC-based collision avoidance achieving 100% collision prevention; led system integration for the hierarchical architecture

GPU-Accelerated Block Cyclic Reduction for MPC — Oct 2025 – Dec 2025

Implemented the Block Thomas algorithm as a CPU baseline (O(n) complexity); developed a Riccati-recursion baseline and a GPU BCR implementation for KKT system solvers, achieving sub-5 ms runtime for N = 10,752 dimensions in trajectory optimization