Dr. Cheng Zhang is a Director of Research leading CoreML team at the Ellison Institute of Technology (EIT), focusing on multimodal foundation models for a range of applications with social impact. She has over a decade of experience in GenAI and machine learning, spanning cutting-edge research and research-to-product translation in collaboration with cross-functional teams.

Before joining EIT, Dr. Zhang served as a Research Manager in Meta’s Superintelligence Lab (formerly the GenAI/LLaMA team), leading a EMEA team on reasoning and agent research. Prior to that, she held Technical Lead Research Manager role at Microsoft Research Cambridge for over 6.5 years and conducted research at Disney Research, Carnegie Mellon University, before that.

Throughout her career, Dr. Zhang has driven high-impact projects that bring scientific research innovations to real-world applications. She and her teams have conducted research in reasoning, agent and factuality capability in foundation models,  deep generative modeling, causal machine learning, and probabilistic modeling in prior work. Her research on causally aware deep learning led to a program allocation system at Microsoft that tripled marketing efficiency in scaled managed partners, and she advanced AI-driven personalized education technologies reaching more than half of UK schools through third-party collaborations.

Dr. Zhang is also an active contributor in the global AI research community, serving as Program Chair for NeurIPS 2024, General Chair for NeurIPS 2025, and a current member of the NeurIPS Board.