# Zan Huang Canonical site: https://zanhuang.org/ Computational neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and music composition. Staff researcher at the Sripada Lab at the University of Michigan and executive director of HuronARC. It is 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 post fully or half-formed thoughts on the writing page when I am thinking in public. ## About The contemporary condition often separates us into distinct tasks or roles that dissociate a human subject into economically useful parts. This does not create a coherent model of reality that an organism can use to navigate its world. Knowing that I am an organism, I maintain a belief that integration — in the Humboldtian sense — is just as important as depth. True depth comes from a deep and careful synthesis between the multiple faces worn by both the arts and sciences across seemingly disparate domains. I also understand the limits of this. Even within mathematics, it was often stated that David Hilbert was the last person who knew all of math, as math was much smaller as a field in the early 20th century. Even Guillaume de Machaut was considered the last poet bard "troubadour" in his time. Chasing your curiosity often leads me to unreasonable places, however the tasks we feel the most drawn to at any moment is a function of both the organism and its environment. If sufficient mental blockades imposed by a socio-economic structure are absent, the organism will naturally seek a more base optimization landscape. ## 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: https://foresight.org/people/zan-huang/ I previously worked at the Laboratory for Integrated Brain Imaging (University of Michigan) as a NeuroAI researcher until May 2026, on eigenmodes and cortical surface methods in conjunction with travelling waves, in addition to work in Neural AI and functional segregation: https://libi.engin.umich.edu/ I am also currently 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: https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/sripada/ I was also Co-Founder of Myelin Neurotech, a nonprofit working on neurotechnology research. We managed to run a hacker house for one summer that ended up changing the trajectory of my life for better or worse. I still find the fortunate and unfortunate consequences of that one summer to be fascinating: https://www.businessinsider.com/living-hacker-house-completely-changed-career-trajectory-2024-10 ## Artistic work I compose. Some of the work is collected at https://zanh.myportfolio.com. 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. What I write about the pieces is part of the work. Technology and nature are not opposites. What we create and claim domain over has already made a claim on us. Composition, for me, is one way of thinking that through. ### Black Mass [For Good Friday] (2024) For 12-piece choir, string quartet, and piano. Premiered and commissioned by Jacob Carroll, March 2024. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OJOVm4swSs The initial idea came standing in the Detroit Institute of Arts atrium with the Diego Rivera mural. The endless depth of workers layered like a renaissance painting, the birds juxtaposed next to planes, the hands growing from mountainous rock, the human child cradling in the earth whose roots grew into the industrial instilled a spiritual experience where technology and nature were, to me, finally unveiled as one being. Rivera says that we are natural, and thus the instruments of our own hand are natural processes. The story of creation, crucifixion, redemption, and the second coming are not linear events, but events that happen outside of time. It is at once the origin before time, the end of time, and also always present and happening. If we, humans and the material reality around us, are necessarily vectors carrying out the divine will and the word (logos), then the second coming is wrought out of our own technology. In our technological process, we bring about both armageddon, salvation, and renewal simultaneously. What lies in our relationship to technology is something as ancient as our mythology. What we build is set in stone in the partitions and symbolic order of our souls and psyches. That also gives theology an axiomatic truth. When Ecce Homo begins, the music must be both glimmering with beauty and terrifying. Movements: I. The Mechanical Heart; II. Blind; III. Nightscapes I; IV. Interlude; V. Ecce Homo; VI. The Second Coming. ### In Portbou (2023) For Pierrot ensemble, electronics, mezzo, and baritone. Premiere at the Kerrytown Concert House, Ann Arbor, 18 April 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75J2pbFAHmg The piece follows the last seven years of Walter Benjamin's life. Benjamin worked within a strange syncretic intersection of ideas and disciplines still unmatched in its originality: Marxist theoretician in the Frankfurt school, Jewish mystic, translator of French poetry, encyclopedist, German literary scholar, psychedelic writer, experimental art radio broadcaster. The music is a collage of memory, symbols, mechanical reproduction, and Angelus Novus. ### Other pieces - Nocturne — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baxBlABzeWo - After the Violinkonzert — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d89Mn8zzxCo ## Education 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. Awarded the Sam Epstein Award for Contributions to Theoretical Cognitive Science by the Weinberg Institute for Cognitive Science. Languages: English (native); Chinese (native speaking / professional fluency); German (functional B1–B2). ## 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. https://arxiv.org/abs/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. Talk: selected talk on ongoing technical work — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WGj1RkWdv4 ## Contact - zanhuang@huronarc.com - zanh@umich.edu - https://twitter.com/TheZanHuang - HuronARC: 175 Jackson Plaza, Ann Arbor, MI 48103 ## Pages - Home: https://zanhuang.org/ - Writing: https://zanhuang.org/writing.html - Two Images of Ann Arbor in Different Years: https://zanhuang.org/writing/two-images.html - Outside Permutation: https://zanhuang.org/writing/outside-permutation.html - Visualizing Movement in Higher Dimensions: https://zanhuang.org/writing/visualizing.html - Index for language models: https://zanhuang.org/llms.txt ## Two Images of Ann Arbor in Different Years 5 September 2026. https://zanhuang.org/writing/two-images.html ### Ars Poetica 2020 I once danced drunk for you in the rain, barefoot on wet road gravel. And though I did not enjoy bare feet, the rain fell in bitter patter—it was music, music of late spring, when the goddamn rain wouldn't stop, and when every afternoon my breathing was scented gin-bright from juniper milk poured in the fragile solo cups, occasionally crushed, cut and bled my soiled feet. I despised wet and unclean ground; however, Dendrites Dionysus was hidden in the musky wooden scent of cheaply built and old student housing, and the two of you there, Sanya and Eric, just reminded me of fig trees and grape vines and sexual organs, both the pomegranate and the phallus. And I danced, drenched on the pale Sunday, limbs burning brightly, sweating, despite feeling like strange fish submerged in the otherworldly coldness of Arctic water. ### Nickels Arcade 2022 I first arrived here as a stranger; I spoke a pidgin sounding of crushed candy wrappers amidst crackling pomegranate seeds, just like how tildes hang from verses' edges', unable to communicate that pregnant silence preceding spoken language. And outside the tobacco shop, I peeled dry flaky skin from parched coffee kissed lips, sun tanned under the August sun, anxious and confused about the role I should play, whether I should step into the shop or stay pinned between this intersection of customer, spectator, and passerby, struck in front of dozens of unwatching eyes, who would soon go on living their thing, going boating at the local river. The August sun beats down through arcade glass; I step under crusty dark hardwood frames, feeling uncertain, with no intent to buy wooden pipes hanging against the wall or ivory shaving cream carefully sealed into shining portable tin jars. Those summer days felt like the streets leading back to my house, in anxious right angles. Each day started at the morning mirror, then kept away to distant places before returning right back to where it all began.