Resume

Summary

Zimu (Zim) Gong

Robotics research engineer at Meta FAIR focused on VLA models, reinforcement learning, and deploying machine learning models to robots.

  • San Francisco Bay Area
  • zimgong@umich.edu

Education

Master of Science, Computer Science

Aug 2024 - May 2026

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI

Bachelor of Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering

Sep 2020 - Aug 2024

UM-SJTU Joint Institute, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China

Study Abroad, Electrical and Computer Engineering

Jan 2023 - May 2023

Cornell University, Ithaca, NY

Professional Experience

Research Engineer

Jun 2026 - Present

Meta · FAIR · Menlo Park, CA

  • Researching robotics and physical AI as part of FAIR.
  • Working on VLA models, reinforcement learning, and robot intelligence.

Research Engineer / Research Intern

Jan 2026 - Jun 2026

Assured Robot Intelligence · San Diego, CA

  • Founding member of ARI, which was acquired by Meta.
  • Built research systems for industry-grade physical AI and robotics applications.

Research Intern

May 2025 - Aug 2025

Waabi · A&A Behaviors Team · San Francisco, CA

  • Worked on traffic simulation and safety-critical scenario generation.
  • Developed traffic models with flow-matching VAE methods.
  • Contributed to work accepted at ICRA 2026.

Autonomous Division Member

Aug 2024 - May 2025

MRacing · Ann Arbor, MI

  • Worked on mapping and localization for autonomous FSAE.
  • Designed and implemented an EKF-SLAM algorithm in ROS for autocross events.

Research Intern

May 2024 - Aug 2024

Lightwheel

  • Participated in the development of an in-house simulator supporting Unreal Engine and 3DGS hybrid rendering.
  • Trained and evaluated end-to-end autonomous driving models.
  • Worked on simulation, imitation learning, and reinforcement learning for manipulation tasks.

Drive Sim Intern

Jun 2023 - Aug 2023

Lightwheel

  • Developed a data visualization system for custom synthetic autonomous vehicle simulation data i.e. (bounding boxes, maps, diagnostics) with Python Foxglove framework.
  • Developed a synthetic data generation system with Unreal Engine that features keyboard control, customizable sensor modelling for cameras and lidars and smart agent system that utilizes a built-in navigation mechanism in UE.
  • Developed and maintained a Python library that contains sensor models and 3D transformation methods.

Publication

Conditional Flow-VAE for Safety-Critical Traffic Scenario Generation

ICRA 2026 · May 2026

Accepted to the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.