Yan Zhang is a scientific leader at Meshcapade and a guest lecturer at ETH Zurich's Computer Vision and Learning Group (VLG). He previously served as a postdoctoral researcher at ETH Zurich (2020-2023) and research intern at Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (2018-2020). His research focuses on generative human foundation models, human motion and behavior synthesis, 3D human perception, and applications in AR/VR, embodied AI, and interactive avatars. He has pioneered methods for scene-conditioned motion generation, contact-aware reconstruction, and egocentric interaction modeling. His recent publications (2025-2020) span Real-time motor models for avatars (PRIMAL, ICCV'25) Diffusion architectures for motion (RoHM, CVPR'24) Scene-population algorithms (Odysseus, CVPR'22) Physics-aware reconstruction (EgoHMR, ICCV'23) Whole-body grasping models (SAGA, ECCV'22) Multi-modal datasets (EgoBody, ECCV'22) Scientific recognition includes the Qualcomm Innovative Fellowship Europe 2023 . He organized workshops at CVPR'25, ECCV'24, and ECCV'22, and served on senior program committees (AAAI'26) and area chairs (CVPR'25). As co-supervisor, he mentored student projects on diffusion-based hand motion capture, 3D pose estimation, body-scene interaction, and mixed reality navigation at ETH Zurich (2020-2023). His work bridges computer vision, machine learning, and computer graphics to advance human-centric AI systems.










