Zuobai Zhang
Zuobai Zhang 「张作柏」
Research Scientist
NVIDIA Research, Santa Clara, CA

I am a Research Scientist in the Fundamental Generative AI Research (GenAIR) Group at NVIDIA Research, supervised by Arash Vahdat. I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from Mila – Québec AI Institute and Université de Montréal in 2026, advised by Prof. Jian Tang. My research focuses on deep generative models for protein structure design, protein representation learning, and AI-driven drug discovery. At NVIDIA, I contribute to the Proteina generative model suite for protein structure design, and proposed Complexa, a generative protein binder design model with successful wet-lab validation.

I received my B.S. in Computer Science (Honor Class) from Fudan University in 2021, advised by Prof. Zhongzhi Zhang. I was also a Machine Learning Engineering Intern at ByteDance (2020–2021), working on recommender systems.

News
Selected Publications

* denotes equal contribution. See Google Scholar for a full list.

ICLR 2026 · Oral
Kieran Didi*, Zuobai Zhang*, Guoqing Zhou*, Danny Reidenbach*, Zhonglin Cao*, Sooyoung Cha*, Tomas Geffner, Christian Dallago, Jian Tang, Michael M. Bronstein, Martin Steinegger, Emine Kucukbenli, Arash Vahdat, Karsten Kreis
ICLR 2026
Tomas Geffner*, Kieran Didi*, Zhonglin Cao, Danny Reidenbach, Zuobai Zhang, Christian Dallago, Emine Kucukbenli, Karsten Kreis, Arash Vahdat
Preprint 2025
Danny Reidenbach*, Zhonglin Cao*, Zuobai Zhang*, Kieran Didi, Tomas Geffner, Guoqing Zhou, Jian Tang, Christian Dallago, Arash Vahdat, Emine Kucukbenli, Karsten Kreis
ICLR 2025 · Oral
Tomas Geffner*, Kieran Didi*, Zuobai Zhang*, Danny Reidenbach, Zhonglin Cao, Jason Yim, Mario Geiger, Christian Dallago, Emine Kucukbenli, Arash Vahdat, Karsten Kreis*
Nature Communications 2024
Huiyu Cai*, Zuobai Zhang*, Mingkai Wang*, Bozitao Zhong*, Yanling Wu, Tianlei Ying, Jian Tang
NeurIPS 2023 · Spotlight
Zuobai Zhang*, Minghao Xu*, Aurélie Lozano, Vijil Chenthamarakshan, Payel Das, Jian Tang
NeurIPS 2023
Yangtian Zhang*, Zuobai Zhang*, Bozitao Zhong, Sanchit Misra, Jian Tang
ICLR 2023
Zuobai Zhang, Minghao Xu, Arian Jamasb, Vijil Chenthamarakshan, Aurelie Lozano, Payel Das, Jian Tang
Awards