About Me
I am a junior researcher and 2nd year CS PhD student in the School of Interactive Computing at
Georgia Tech, where I’m advised by Professor Munmun De Choudhury at the Social Dynamics and Wellbeing (SocWeb) Lab. I obtained my Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science (with High Honors) from
Dartmouth College, where I was fortunate to be advised by Professors Nicholas Jacobson and Andrew Campbell.
My research examines how human health is recorded in radically different languages: continuous physiological and behavioral signals from wearables, dense clinical shorthand in electronic health records, and the everyday words people use to describe how they’re doing. How can we build AI systems that connect these representations, reason about how health changes, and communicate what they learn to humans?
Specifically, I seek to answer this question by developing human-centered AI models that learn from and reason over longitudinal health data. My recent work spans large pre-trained foundation models for wearable time series and LLM-based systems for reconstructing temporal patient journeys from unstructured clinical records. Ultimately, I aim to translate these models into systems that can integrate fragmented health information and support human and clinical decision-making.
✨ I am actively seeking Summer 2027 research internship opportunities in industry. If you think my interests in foundation models, LLMs, longitudinal health data, and human-centered AI could be a good fit for your team, I would love to connect — please feel free to reach out at azhang677@gatech.edu.
Outside of research, I enjoy a myriad of hobbies spanning sports (running, pilates/yoga, climbing, skiing, and hiking), creative arts (self-taught water-coloring and crocheting), and music (I am a classically trained cellist since the age of 8).
Updates
[May 2026]: Our work A Foundation Model for Wearable Movement Data in Mental Health Research has been accepted to IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics (JBHI)! 🥳 🎉
[August 2025]: Started school as a CS PhD student at the SocWeb Lab at Georgia Tech! Go Jackets! 🐝 🥳
[July 2025]: Our work SeePerSea, which I collaborated in my earlier undergraduate years at Dartmouth, has been accepted to IEEE Transactions on Field Robotics 2025 🥳 Website Link
[June 2025]: Graduated from Dartmouth with a Major in Computer Science and a minor in Environmental Studies! 🌲 🎓 "vox clamantis in deserto" 💚
[June 2025]: Successfully defended my undergraduate thesis in CS at Dartmouth! MotionTeller: Multi-modal Integration of Wearable Time-Series with LLMs for Health and Behavioral Understanding, has been awarded High Honors! Yay! 🥳 Now in review at the Dartmouth Digital Commons
[April 2025]: I'll be joining Georgia Tech as a CS PhD student in Fall 2025! 🎉 💛
[November 2024]: Our work, A Foundation Model for Wearable Movement Data in Mental Health Research, is now available as a preprint on ArXiv! Our model is the first foundation model designed specifically for actigraphy, which is publicly available - pretrained weights, standardized preprocessing scripts, and full model code are released to GitHub
Research Experiences
[August 2025 - Present] Graduate Research Assistant at the Social Dynamics and Wellbeing Lab @ Georgia Tech Advised by Professor Munmun De Choudhury.
[March 2025 - August 2025] Research Assistant at the HealthX Lab @ Dartmouth College Advised by Professor Andrew T. Campbell and mentored by PhD student Arvind Pillai.
[April 2024 - August 2025] Research Assistant at the Jacobson Lab @ Dartmouth Geisel School of Medicine Advised by Professor Nicholas C. Jacobson.
[January 2023 - June 2024] Research Assistant at the Dartmouth Reality and Robotics Lab Advised by Professor Alberto Quattrini Li.
Industry
[May 2022 - August 2022] Consultant Intern, TMT & FIG groups at Boston Consulting Group (Hong Kong)Education
[August 2025 - Present] Computer Science PhD Student at the School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology [September 2021 - June 2025] Undergraduate student, Computer Science major at Dartmouth College