Weidong Zhang

Hi, I’m Weidong. In Fall 2026, I will join Simon Fraser University as a PhD student in Computing Science, where I am honored to be advised by Prof. Marzena Karpinska! I look forward to beginning my PhD journey and exploring new research directions under Prof. Karpinska’s guidance.

I graduated with an M.S. in Data Analytics Engineering from Northeastern University. During my master’s studies and research assistantship, my work has spanned two main directions. In one line of work, I collaborate with Prof. Nabeel Gillani on intellectual humility in online political discourse, using large-scale Reddit data, LLM-based classifiers, and experimental interventions to study how online environments shape conversational behavior. In another line of work, I collaborate with Prof. Jeeho Ryoo on diffusion-based medical image generation, developing lesion-aware 3D diffusion models for synthetic MRI generation and evaluating their utility through image-quality metrics and downstream segmentation tasks.