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Research experience, education, selected outputs and technical expertise.
Basics
| Name | Yu Zhang |
| Label | PhD Researcher in Chemical and Process Engineering |
| yu.zhang@surrey.ac.uk | |
| Url | https://yurbro.github.io |
| Summary | PhD researcher developing AI-enabled, uncertainty-aware and increasingly autonomous methods for dermal formulation design, experimental decision-making and scientific data engineering. |
Work
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2024.09 - Present Guildford, UK
Teaching Assistant
University of Surrey
Teaching support across engineering systems, science principles and advanced pharmaceutical formulations.
- ENG2128 Engineering Systems and Management
- ENG1080 Science Principles for Engineers
- CHEM042 Advanced Pharmaceutical Formulations
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2023.09 - Present Guildford, UK
PhD Researcher
University of Surrey
AI-enabled formulation design and experimental decision-making for dermal drug delivery.
- Develop probabilistic surrogate models, active-learning strategies and early-stopping algorithms for IVRT and IVPT experiments.
- Build interpretable dynamic models using domain-knowledge-constrained symbolic regression.
- Develop reproducible scientific LLM workflows for evidence extraction and dataset construction.
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2020.12 - 2022.07 China
Technical Lead
Industrial data analytics projects
Applied process-data analytics to reservoir simulation and energy-market intelligence.
- Characterised dominant flow fields from numerical reservoir simulations using clustering and data-driven analysis.
- Built web-scraping and visual analytics components for a shale-gas trading market intelligence system.
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2020.10 - 2021.10 Beijing, China
Lead Researcher - Fault Diagnosis and Intelligent Early Warning
National Key R&D Programme of China project
Data-driven fault diagnosis for underwater production systems.
- Led development of intelligent early-warning algorithms in Python.
- Identified pump failures from operational process data.
Education
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2023.09 - 2027.09 Guildford, UK
PhD
University of Surrey
Chemical and Process Engineering
- Digital twin and AI methods for topical formulation design
- Supervisors: Professor Tao Chen and Dr Dimitrios Tsaoulidis
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2020.09 - 2023.07 Beijing, China
MEng
China University of Petroleum - Beijing
Control Science and Engineering, College of Artificial Intelligence
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2015.09 - 2019.07 Sichuan, China
Publications
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2026 A modelling-based comparison of IVRT and synthetic-membrane permeation for early formulation screening
RSC Pharmaceutics
Quantifies alignment between IVRT and synthetic-membrane permeation assays.
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2026 Confidence-Bound Early Stopping of Experiments with Sequential Calibration
Chemical Engineering Research and Design, 230, 756-766
Early stopping with calibrated control of the false-stop rate.
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2026 Autonomous AI-Driven Design for Skin Product Formulations
Advanced Intelligent Discovery, e70100
A roadmap for assay-aware, closed-loop and increasingly autonomous skin formulation development.
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2026 Active learning-based adaptive optimisation for developing dermal drug formulations
Chemical Engineering Research and Design, 232
Adaptive batch allocation between expected-improvement and information-seeking formulation candidates.
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2025 An early decision-making algorithm for accelerating topical drug formulation optimisation
Computers & Chemical Engineering, 201, 109224
Probabilistic early decisions from partial IVPT trajectories.
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2024 Data augmentation using improved conditional GAN under extremely limited fault samples and its application in fault diagnosis of electric submersible pump
Journal of the Franklin Institute, 361(4), 106629
Virtual sample generation for fault diagnosis under extreme data scarcity.
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2023 Improving metric-based few-shot learning with dynamically scaled softmax loss
Image and Vision Computing, 140, 104860
A dynamically scaled loss for metric-based few-shot image classification.
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2023 Improved dynamic kernel PCA based on local preserving projections and its application for electric submersible pump fault diagnosis
The Canadian Journal of Chemical Engineering, 101(8), 4539-4554
Local-structure-preserving nonlinear dynamic process monitoring.
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2022 Green scheduling optimization of shuttle tanker route considering carbon emissions
Chemical Industry and Engineering, 39(2), 23-31
Multi-objective route scheduling with carbon-emission considerations.
Projects
- 2024 - 2026
Adaptive Batch Optimisation
Active learning for formulation optimisation under a limited per-batch experimental budget.
- Gaussian process regression
- Expected improvement
- Hypervolume contribution
- 2023 - 2025
Early Decision-Making Algorithm
Forecasting final permeation outcomes from partial IVPT trajectories.
- Uncertainty quantification
- Probability of exceedance
- Experimental resource saving
- 2025 - Present
Domain-Constrained Symbolic Regression
Interpretable dynamic modelling and optimisation of dermal drug release.
- Domain constraints
- Dynamic modelling
- Interpretable optimisation
- 2026 - Present
SkinMiner
LLM-powered extraction and verification of dermal formulation evidence.
- Scientific LLMs
- Evidence provenance
- Structured datasets
Awards
- 2023.09
China Scholarship Council - University of Surrey Award
China Scholarship Council and University of Surrey
Doctoral scholarship, Grant No. 202306440060.
- 2025.01
UK Turing Scheme Research Placement
UK Turing Scheme
Research placement at West China Hospital, Sichuan University.
Skills
| AI and Modelling | |
| Gaussian processes | |
| Active learning | |
| Bayesian optimisation | |
| Symbolic regression | |
| Uncertainty quantification | |
| Large language models |
| Formulation and Experiments | |
| Dermal drug delivery | |
| IVRT | |
| IVPT | |
| Formulation design | |
| Digital twins | |
| Automated experimentation |
| Computing | |
| Python | |
| pandas | |
| scikit-learn | |
| SciPy | |
| Matplotlib | |
| Git | |
| Reproducible research |
Languages
| Chinese | |
| Native speaker |
| English | |
| Professional working proficiency |
Interests
| Research interests | |
| AI for science | |
| Autonomous laboratories | |
| Skin product formulation | |
| Scientific data engineering | |
| Process systems engineering |