Heng Zhang is a PhD Fellow at the Human-Robot Interfaces and Interaction (HRI²) Laboratory at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT), supervised by Dr. Arash Ajoudani. He defended his PhD in June 2026 with the dissertation Towards Safe Embodied Intelligence: Learning Contact-Rich Manipulation from Impedance Control to Multimodal Foundation Models. Before that, he earned his Master’s degree in Control Engineering from the Robotics & AI Lab at Tongji University, China.
His research focuses on robot manipulation, reinforcement learning, and robotics for scientific discovery.
Outside the lab, Heng enjoys traveling, hiking, reading, and watching films.
