Yuhan Tang

PhD Student @ MIT | PhD SWE Intern @ Google

Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States

About

I am a PhD student from the Interdepartmental Program in Transportation at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I am extremely fortunate to be advised by Prof. Jinhua Zhao and Prof. Haris N. Koutsopoulos. I work at MIT JTL Urban Mobility Lab and MIT Transit Lab. I received my Master of Science in Systems Engineering from University of California at Berkeley, advised by Prof. Joan Walker and Prof. Marta Gonzalez, and my Bachelor’s degree in Transportation Engineering from Tongji University. My research focuses on bridging the gap between scheduling and operations in urban mobility. I develop algorithms to improve the planning, control, and reliability of transportation systems, with a particular focus on public transit and ride-hailing systems. Methodologically, my work draws on optimization, LLM reasoning, and deep reinforcement learning. More specifically, I study how integer optimization can improve transit scheduling and vehicle assignment, how deep reinforcement learning can support adaptive ride-hailing operations, and how modern LLMs can help connect operational data, technical documentation, and human decision-making in complex mobility systems.

Experience

  • Software Engineer Intern (Machine Learning) at Google
    May 2026 - Present · 2 mos

    AI & Infrastructure (AI2) Team - Developing a runtime optimization framework for production server systems. - Building a Gemini-powered long-context retrieval and reasoning pipeline to analyze technical documentation, extract domain knowledge, identify configuration constraints, and prune the search space of runtime-tunable server knobs. - Integrating the structured search space with a reinforcement learning engine that learns from real-time Google workload feedback for scalable, adaptive fleet optimization.

  • Graduate Student Researcher at California PATH - ITS Research Center at UC Berkeley
    Jan 2024 - Jun 2024 · 6 mos

    50% Appointment Project: Real-Time Work Zone Data Exchange Platform for AV Navigation Supervisor: Dr. Hao Liu, Dr. Alexander A. Kurzhanskiy, Prof. Scott Moura

  • Research Intern at MIT JTL-Transit Lab
    May 2023 - Dec 2023 · 8 mos

    Project: Domain-Randomized Curriculum for Robust Reinforcement Learning in Bus Operations Advisor: Prof. Jinhua Zhao; Mentor: Ao Qu

  • Graduate Student Instructor at University of California, Berkeley
    Jun 2023 - Aug 2023 · 3 mos

    CCPHIT Summer Bootcamp Instructor: Prof. Raja Sengupta, UCB; Prof. Gora Datta, UCB - Instruct the individual project.

  • Teaching Assistant at Tongji University
    Sep 2020 - Jun 2022 · 1 yr 10 mos

    As a teaching assistant in School of Mathematical Science, Tongji University, I lectured on Advanced Mathematics and Linear Algebra for freshmen as a supplement to the regular courses. Each lecture had an average of over 200 attendees.