Qianzhong Chen’s Website
I’m a first year PhD student of Stanford Aero-Astro Department, advised by Dr. Mac Schwager. Previous to that, I was a research assistant at UIUC-ACRL, advised by Dr. Naira Hovakimyan and Dr. Sheng Cheng.
I also spent time at xdof.ai, Unitree, Centrillion working as robotics engineering/research intern. I was fortunate to be advised by Philipp Wu (xdof.ai), Fred Shentu (xdof.ai).
My interests and background are across robot VLA model, world model, progress-based reward model, and autonomous drones visual navigation.
I received my Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from both Zhejiang University and UIUC in 2023. I received my Master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University in 2025.
My Resume can be found here (updated Dec. 2025).
Feel free to contact me via email (qchen23 {at} stanford.edu), linkedin or WeChat: CQZ_David.
[OPEN TO WORK]: I am actively seeking research internship opportunities for Summer 2026. My research interests include Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models and World Models, with applications in both robot manipulation and autonomous driving.
Recent news
- 2025/11: Our new paper GRaD-Nav++ on drone VLA has been accepted to RA-L 2025!
- 2025/08: Our new paper ARCH on RL for manipulations has been accepted to CoRL 2025!
- 2025/08: Our new paper ParticleFormer on 3D world model for manipulations has been accepted to CoRL 2025!
- 2025/06: Our new paper GRaD-Nav on drone end-to-end visual navigation has been accepted to IROS 2025!
- 2025/06: Our new paper DiffTune-HECTOR on auto-tuning bipedal robots MPC controllers has been accepted to IROS 2025!
- 2025/04: I was admitted to the Aeronautics and Astronautics Department, Stanford University as a PhD student, supervised by Dr. Mac Schwager.
Honors and awards
- Stanford Aero-Astro PhD Fellowship (2025)
- Outstanding Undergraduate Thesis Award, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Zhejiang University (2023)
- First Class Academic Scholarship of ZJU-UIUC Institute (Top 1%) (2022)
Service
- Journal Articles Reviewer: IEEE RA-L (2025), IEEE IoT (2025)
- Conference Reviewer: IROS (2025), ICRA (2026)
- Member of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society