Jerry Zhang

Projects

Things I've built and worked on, newest first.

  1. 2026

    Latent structure in protein sequences via HMMs

    How much of a protein’s 3D organization can a simple, interpretable model recover? Unsupervised hidden Markov models find recurring biochemical patterns in amino-acid sequences, and I compare their latent states against hydrophobicity, secondary structure, and solvent accessibility, alongside composition-based and supervised baselines.

    StatisticsComputational biology
  2. 2026

    Optimization and sampling in spin glasses

    Competing interactions give spin glasses rugged energy landscapes full of local minima. This project measures how temperature, disorder, and interaction structure affect discrete and gradient-based algorithms across four canonical spin models, and when each one gets trapped.

    OptimizationStatistical physics
  3. 2025

    Multiple descent for minimum ℓ₁-norm interpolators

    Heavily overparameterized models can keep improving well past the interpolation threshold. I reproduce prior multiple-descent results for Gaussian designs and extend them to study how signal sparsity and feature distributions drive a further drop in test error.

    Statistical learning theory
  4. 2025

    Feedback and torsional growth of a 1D filament

    Growing filaments can buckle and twist under mechanical constraints. Using simulations of a filament attached to a substrate, I test whether stress-based feedback on growth can keep it straight and stable.

    BiophysicsSimulation
  5. 2024

    Pattern formation in nonlinear reaction-diffusion systems

    A stochastic look at how patterns emerge in reaction-diffusion systems, using the spatial Gillespie algorithm with τ-leaping and extending standard models with nonlinear diffusion.

    Stochastic simulation
  6. 2023

    Computational methods for quantum many-body problems

    Methods for spin-lattice systems such as the quantum Heisenberg model: symmetry reduction to speed up exact diagonalization, and a new variational Monte Carlo approach built on group-equivariant convolutional neural networks.

    Quantum physicsMachine learning
  7. 2023

    Molecular dynamics of soil-strengthening hydrogels

    Molecular dynamics simulations of polyelectrolyte-nanocomposite hydrogels built from bacterial biopolymers, studied as a lower-carbon alternative to concrete for soil adhesion and water retention.

    Molecular dynamicsMaterials
  8. 2026

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