About me

I am a researcher at OpenAI, working in the Foundations team. (I also previously worked in the Safety Systems team.)

In terms of my research interests, I primarily work on transfer learning and natural language understanding with large-scale language models.

• In Spring 2024, I graduated with my PhD from the NYU Center for Data Science, where I was advised by Sam Bowman.
• I still maintain my affiliations with EleutherAI as well as the Alignment Research Group at NYU.
• I was previously a student researcher at Google Brain and a research intern at Google Translate, a research intern at Google Cloud AI, as well as an intern at Microsoft on the Cloud & AI team.
• I graduated from the University of Chicago in 2015, where I majored in Mathematics, Statistics and Economics. I obtained my MS in Data Science at the NYU Center for Data Science in 2019.
• I previously worked at AQR Capital Management where I applied machine learning to short-term alpha research as part of the Managed Futures team. I also previously interned at Old Mission Capital, doing research on high-frequency data.

Feel free to reach out to me via Twitter.

While I am currently in San Francisco, if you are a student or researcher in Singapore and interested in NLP research, I am always happy to chat!

Unimportant note about my last name: My last name is 彭, which is péng in Mandarin pinyin. Because my father is of Hakka descent, where 彭 is pronounced closer to “Pang” (rhymes with sung), it eventually got transliterated into “Phang”. Because of more weird Singaporean history regarding Chinese name transliterations, my first name is in pinyin (zhǎn shèng), while my last name is not.

As a result, my last name has been pronounced in the many variations of “fang”, “pang”, etc. (Don’t worry, I’m used to it and it genuinely doesn’t bother me. Foreign names are hard!) Also sometimes I get confused for being Vietnamese because of the similarity to the Vietnamese Phan/Pham/Phung/Phuong.

tl;dr The “H” in my last name is supposed to be silent, but I don’t really mind which way you pronounce it.