Mengjia Zhu

I’m Mengjia (梦佳), a Research Fellow in AI-Driven Automated Chemistry in Cooper Group at the University of Liverpool, advised by Prof. Andrew I Cooper.

I was a Post-Doctoral Research Associate (PDRA) at the University of Manchester under the supervision of Dr. Dongda Zhang from March 2024 - March 2025. I obtained my Ph.D. in Systems Science from the IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca, Italy in 2024, supervised by Prof. Alberto Bemporad. I received my bachelor degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA, in 2017 and my master degree in Advanced Chemical Engineering with Process System Engineering from the Imperial College London, UK, in 2019 under the supervision of Prof. Sandro Macchietto.

My research focuses on data-efficient optimization and learning-based control for complex systems where models are unavailable, expensive, or uncertain. I work on black-box and surrogate-based optimization, including preference-based and mixed-variable methods, with a strong emphasis on optimization under unknown constraints. Additional interests include active and distributed learning, safe and specification-guided learning for feedback control systems, and critical scenario identification for safety-critical applications. Key application domains include automated driving, process systems, and automated and autonomous laboratory experimentation, with the goal of enabling reliable closed-loop decision making in real-world scientific and engineering systems.