About
Welcome to my website. It's a little complicated to summarize the nature and overall picture of the things I work on into one coherent biography. I hope I can explain myself through more or less the juxtaposed collage of my interests and experiences. I will be posting fully or half formed thoughts routinely on the writing page if you are curious what I might be thinking about these days.
Scientific Work
My interests lie in alternative computational models of artificial intelligence, modeling of mass social patterns, chaotic and emergent phenomena in physical and information systems, and linguistics. My research was focused on novel ways of scaling deep neural networks through neurologically inspired modularity leading to compositional generalization in visual perception systems.
I am the executive director of HuronARC, a sovereign lab and holding company built to give scientists and thinkers the freedom and infrastructure to pursue breakthrough or economically meaningful work, free from the rigid oversight of public markets and the fragmentation of modern academia. Generally, this synthesizes the spirit of how the formation of the medieval university came about and a modern technocratic rendering of guild structures.
I was a 2024 Foresight Institute Fellow in Neurotechnology, and Co-Founder of Myelin Neurotech, a nonprofit working on neurotechnology research.
I previously worked at the Laboratory for Integrated Brain Imaging (UofM) as a NeuroAI researcher until May 2026, where I also worked on eigenmodes and cortical surface methods in conjunction with travelling waves in addition to my work in Neural AI and functional segregation.
I am also a staff researcher at the Sripada Lab at the University of Michigan working on mechanistic interpretability and computational theories of cognition, where I also pursue independent work in computation and AI.
Artistic Work
I compose, and some of my work is collected in my artistic portfolio. I studied with Rodney Lister at the New England Conservatory Preparatory School, and with Paul Schoenfield, Bright Sheng, and Evan Chambers at the University of Michigan.
Education
My degrees were High Honors bachelor's degrees in Computational Cognitive Science and Music Composition from the University of Michigan, with minors in Computer Science and Complex Systems. I was awarded the Sam Epstein Award for Contributions to Theoretical Cognitive Science by the Weinberg Institute for Cognitive Science.
Research
- Hu, X., Angstadt, M., Storks, S., Huang, Z., Taxali, A., Weigard, A., Lewis, R. L., & Sripada, C. (2026). Conflict and Congruency Effects in Large Language Models: In-Weight and In-Context Competition in a Verbal Conflict Task . arXiv:2608.11510.
- Huang, Z. (2025). Emerging Functional Differentiation of Multiplicatively Combined Neural Network Pathways through Contrastive Predictive Coding and Input Segregation . Undergraduate thesis, University of Michigan.
Talks
Selected talk on ongoing technical work