Zhe Fu
Bio: Zhe Fu works at the intersection of control, AI, and sustainable transportation. Her research focuses on physics-informed modeling and control for mixed-autonomy mobility systems. She is a Ph.D. candidate in Transportation Engineering and an M.S. candidate in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, under the supervision of Professor Alexandre Bayen, and holds an M.S. in Transportation Engineering from Berkeley. She earned her bachelor’s degree in Transportation Engineering from Tongji University. Beyond contributions to modeling and algorithm design, Zhe has played a key role in large-scale real-world transportation experiments, including the largest mixed-autonomy field deployment to date involving 100 automated vehicles. She was selected as a 2025 Eno Fellow and was the Runner-up in the 2025 Berkeley Grad Slam. Zhe has received multiple Rising Star awards in EECS (MIT), Mechanical Engineering (CMU), and Cyber-Physical Systems (NSF).
Postdoctoral research project: Behavioral Digital Twins for Energy-Efficient Mobility Systems. Transportation is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, yet its energy use is shaped by millions of individual driving decisions. My research develops Behavioral Digital Twins, data-driven, physics-informed models that capture both traffic dynamics and human driving behavior, to improve the energy efficiency of mobility systems. By combining large-scale traffic data, machine learning, and control strategies, this work enables targeted interventions that reduce unnecessary stop-and-go traffic, fuel consumption, and electricity demand. A key focus is designing tools that remain effective as vehicles become increasingly electric, where traffic inefficiencies still waste energy and strain power grids. While mobility is the initial application, the proposed methods are broadly applicable to other complex, human-influenced energy systems where behavior and physical dynamics jointly determine energy use.
Research focus: Sustainable Transportation
Advisors: Eric Darve - Mechanical Engineering; Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering (ICME) | Marco Pavone - Aeronautics and Astronautics; Electrical Engineering; Computer Science