Current Work

I am a senior scientist at Wayve, an embodied AI company. As a scientist of the “Core” team, I designed and productionized the latest generation flagship end-to-end RL driving models which are currently used in Uber robotaxis and being integrated in OEM product lines, including Nissan and Stellantis.

Education Background

Co-advised by Doina Precup & Yoshua Bengio, I acquired my Ph.D. from McGill University (also Mila – Quebec AI Institute), and investigated how to improve the generalization abilities of computational decision-making agents via the inspiring behaviors of the human brain.

Works & Media

Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=TZh189YAAAAJ

GitHub: https://github.com/PwnerHarry

X (formerly Twitter): https://x.com/TheHarryZhao

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harry-zhao-992a16106/

Updates

[2026] I was promoted to become a senior scientist in the Core team at Wayve, responsible for developments of Core RL post-training technology.

[2025] I successfully defended my PhD thesis and acquired the Ph.D. Click here for my PhD thesis.

[2025] I officially joined Wayve as a scientist, working to solve the ambitious problem of embodied AI.

[2025] I finished my visit at University of Ottawa’s Brain and Mind Institute.

[2024] I moved to Ottawa and became a visiting student at University of Ottawa’s Brain and Mind Institute, working on neuroscience related topics with Prof. Richard Naud.

[2024] I finished my internship at RBC Borealis (previously Borealis AI), working on dealing with hallucinated targets proposed by generative models in decision-making, with Tristan Sylvain. This work has later been published and presented as a conference paper at International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2025).

[2023] I left my researcher position at Haiper (Canada). We made the captur3™ app that turns your iPhone into a 3D scanner that uploads real-world objects into the metaverse.

[2023] I successfully finished my internship at Microsoft Researcg, where I was mentored by Harm van Seijen, Remi Tachet & Romain Laroche, working on sequential decision-making.

[2021] I was honored to be 1st place recipient of the 2020 FRQ (Nature and Technologies) PhD excellence fellowship.

[2020] I graduated my M.S. from McGill University with CGPA 4.0/4.0, advised by Doina Precup and Xiao-Wen Chang. My thesis was on meta-adapting policy evaluation.

[2018] I received my B.Eng. from Dalian University of Technology in 2018. My thesis was on zero-shot transfer generalization. I was awarded the “Star of Academic and Research Achievements” of the year by the Dean of Faculty.

More About Me

I am actively learning more knowledge, more skills and evolving consciously towards a better person. I love reading history and learning from it. I like roasting people, and getting roasted is even better. This world is losing its humor, fast!

I love adventures and enjoy a pure life.

Site Last Updated: 13 Jul 2026