Zichao Zhang
CFA Candidate · MSDS Student @ NYU
Data Science · Machine Learning
I’m a Master’s student in Data Science at New York University, and I serve as a section leader for the undergraduate Causal Inference course. My work bridges machine learning and data-centric systems—from interpretable vision and protein modeling to neural decoding and fairness auditing—and I care about clarity, reproducibility, and human-centered impact.
I earned my B.A. in Data Science and Computer Science, with a minor in Business Studies, at NYU. During my undergraduate years, I had the privilege of working with Daniel Berenberg in Kyunghyun Cho’s group on protein representation learning and comprehensive benchmarking for remote homology, and at NYU Langone’s CN³ Lab on neural decoding using large neural datasets. I’m currently seeking Summer 2026 Data Science / Machine Learning internships.
Selected Projects
Learning from 100 Images
Data-efficient vision: compact CNN trained on only 100 images with condensation + augmentation; 98% MNIST with explainability.
Responsible AI Audit for Home Credit ADS
Bias audit on a 120+-feature loan model; found 20pp accuracy gap; pipeline improved AUC-ROC 0.68 → 0.90 while mitigating bias.
Deepfake Facial Imagery Detection
Mobile-optimized detector with strong cross-dataset robustness; 94% test accuracy on 140K-image GAN dataset; ELA + augmentation + Grad-CAM.
RAISE 2024 Finalist: Fear of AI Analysis
NLP on 10k+ AI-related headlines; team placed 3rd among 100+ teams in a national competition.
News
- 2025-08Chose to stay at NYU for the next chapter and start an M.S. in Data Science.
- 2025-08Thrilled to serve as a section leader for Causal Inference (DS‑UA 201) at NYU CDS.
- 2024-09Very fortunate to work with Daniel Berenberg in Kyunghyun Cho’s group on TM‑Vec.
- 2024-05Honored to join the CN³ Lab at NYU Langone and take part in ML studies of visual–hippocampal interactions.
- 2024-04Excited to learn that our team reached the RAISE 2024 finals with an NLP pipeline analyzing 10k+ AI headlines.