Hi! I am a researcher at Stanford HAI and Digital Economy Lab, where I am very fortunate to be mentored by Prof. Alex 'Sandy' Pentland. I am also a final-year PhD candidate at UC Santa Barbara, advised by Prof. Misha Sra. My research explores how large language and multimodal models can reason, collaborate, and adapt safely in complex environments. I work at the intersection of agentic AI, trust and interpretability, and data infrastructure for reasoning models, aiming to make intelligent systems more transparent, efficient, and reliable.

Previously, I was a Student Researcher at Google, where I worked on agentic system and reinforcement learning for LLMs.

My research focuses on:
1. Agentic & Collaborative LLMs: modeling coordination, planning, and reasoning among intelligent agents.
2. Transparent and Trustworthy AI : making model reasoning processes interpretable and auditable.
3. Data-Centric AI: designing human-aligned datasets for post-training and evaluation.
4. Human-AI Co-Reasoning: enabling safe and adaptive interaction in scientific, creative, and high-stakes settings.

I am open to collaborations and always excited to chat about research ideas. Please feel free to reach out to me at zcc [at] stanford.edu.