Hi! I am Zheng-Meng Zhai (翟正蒙). I recently completed my Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering at Arizona State University, from the Chaos Group led by Prof. Ying-Cheng Lai.

I received my Bachelor’s degree in Electronic Information Science and Technology from Southwest Jiaotong University, and my Master’s degree in Theoretical Physics from East China Normal University, where I was advised by Prof. Ming Tang. My background is in physics and electrical engineering, with research focus on combining machine learning with nonlinear dynamics. My current research projects include:

• Tipping point and critical transition prediction
• System dynamics recovery with hybrid transformer and reservoir computing
• Meta learning in dynamical systems prediction
• Physics-inspired machine learning and learning mechanisms
• Model-free nonlinear control

Recent News

• Mar. 4, 2026. Successfully defended my Ph.D. dissertation (Defense slides).
• Dec. 17, 2025. Paper entitled “Learning to learn ecosystems from limited data” published in PNAS.
• Aug. 28, 2025. Paper entitled “Bridging known and unknown dynamics by transformer-based machine-learning inference from sparse observations” published in Nature Communications.
• May. 11, 2025. Travel. SIAM Conference on Applications of Dynamical Systems. Denver, Co.
• Mar. 16, 2025. Travel. APS March Meeting. Anaheim, CA.
• Feb. 4, 2025. Paper entitled “Detecting Attacks and Estimating States of Power Grids from Partial Observations with Machine Learning” published in PRX Energy.
• Nov. 7, 2024. Travel. MURI project kickoff meeting. Yale University, New Haven.
• Sept. 14, 2023. Paper entitled “Model-free tracking control of complex dynamical trajectories with machine learning” published in Nature Communications. \(\rm {\color{tomato} {Highlighted \ as \ a \ Featured \ Article}}\) in Applied Physics and Mathematics.

Academic Experience

• 2021.8 – 2026.3 (Ph.D.) Arizona State University (Advisor: Prof. Ying-Cheng Lai)

• 2021.8 - 2025.5 (M.S.) Arizona State University (Advisor: Prof. Ying-Cheng Lai)

• 2019.9 – 2022.6 (M.S.) East China Normal University (Advisor: Prof. Ming Tang)

• 2015.9 – 2019.6 (B.S.) Southwest Jiaotong University

Services

Journal Reviewer:

Nature Machine Intelligence, Nature Communications,

Physical Review X, PRX Energy, Physical Review Research, Physical Review Applied, Physical Review E,

IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence,  IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computational Intelligence,  IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems,

Neural Networks, New Journal of Physics, Nonliear Dynamics, APL Machine Learning, Chaos, npj Complexity, etc;

Contact Information

Zheng-Meng Zhai

School of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering

Arizona State University

Tempe, Arizona 85281

Email: zhaizhengmeng@gmail.com, zzhai6@asu.edu