CV
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Contact Information
| Name | Zichun Hao |
| Professional Title | Ph.D. Candidate in Physics |
Professional Summary
Physics Ph.D. candidate at Caltech working on machine learning for particle physics, including self-supervised foundation models and geometric deep learning
Experience
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2023 - present Pasadena, CA
Graduate Research Assistant
Caltech High Energy Physics Group
Research at the CMS experiment at CERN and on deep learning methods for physics
- Lead RINO, a self-supervised learning approach and a step towards foundation models for jets, with a spotlight paper at the ML4PS workshop at NeurIPS 2025
- One of the main contributors to the boosted Higgs boson pair search in the four bottom quark final state, responsible for the trigger and jet tagger calibrations behind the published results and for BDT trainings, datacard creation, and final fits in the continuing analysis
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2024 - 2025 Batavia, IL
Visitor
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
Self-supervised learning methods for high energy physics and the search for Higgs boson pair production with CMS data
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2021 - 2023 La Jolla, CA
Undergraduate Researcher
Duarte Lab
Geometric deep learning for experimental high energy physics
- First-authored the Lorentz Group Equivariant Autoencoder (LGAE), an autoencoder fully equivariant to the Lorentz group
- Developed a ParticleNet-based tagger for boosted Higgs boson decays to W boson pairs for the CMS experiment, responsible for model training on Kubernetes clusters
Education
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2023 - present Pasadena, CA
Ph.D. Candidate
California Institute of Technology
Physics
- Master of Science in Physics received June 2026
- Advised by Prof. Maria Spiropulu
- Research in machine learning and experimental high energy physics
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2020 - 2023 La Jolla, CA
Bachelor of Science
University of California, San Diego
Physics and Computer Science (double major)
- Phi Beta Kappa
- Dean’s Undergraduate Award for Excellence
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2018 - 2020 Santa Barbara, CA
Teaching
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Spring 2026 Pasadena, CA
Teaching Assistant
Caltech Ph 22 (Computational Physics Laboratory III)
One of two TAs who designed and built the course’s final project on reinforcement learning for quantum state preparation
- Led weekly lab sessions and taught core AI concepts, from neural network training to policy gradient methods
- Built the final project’s Gymnasium environment over a Tavis-Cummings cavity QED simulator, the REINFORCE reference implementation, and PPO, SAC, and TQC baselines with MLP, LSTM, and Transformer policies
- Designed the project questions, the graded ladder of target quantum states, reward shaping, and multi-seed evaluation requirements
- Graded coursework and mentored students through their final project implementations
Awards
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2025 San Diego, CA
Spotlight paper (first author) at the ML4PS workshop at NeurIPS 2025
ML4PS workshop at NeurIPS
Offered to about 1% of the workshop’s accepted papers
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2025 Batavia, IL
Fermilab LPC Guest and Visitor Award
Fermilab LHC Physics Center
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2024 Batavia, IL
Fermilab LPC Guest and Visitor Award
Fermilab LHC Physics Center
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2022 Phi Beta Kappa Honor Society
Phi Beta Kappa
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2022 La Jolla, CA
Dean's Undergraduate Award for Excellence
UC San Diego Physical Sciences
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2021 La Jolla, CA
Undergraduate Summer Research Award
UC San Diego