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Research experience, education, selected outputs and technical expertise.

Basics

Name Yu Zhang
Label PhD Researcher in Chemical and Process Engineering
Email 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

  • 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
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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

  • 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
  • 2020.09 - 2023.07

    Beijing, China

    MEng
    China University of Petroleum - Beijing
    Control Science and Engineering, College of Artificial Intelligence
  • 2015.09 - 2019.07

    Sichuan, China

    BEng
    Panzhihua University
    Automation, School of Intelligent Manufacturing

Publications

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

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