Sheng receives Grainger Wisconsin Distinguished Graduate Fellowship

Zihao Sheng, a PhD student in transportation engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has received a prestigious 2026-27 Grainger Wisconsin Distinguished Graduate Fellowship.

Sheng joined Civil and Environmental Engineering Assistant Professor Sikai Chen’s lab in January 2023 and has, since then, focused on research that tackles some of the toughest challenges with autonomous driving. His research focuses on combining multimodal foundation models with reinforcement learning to enable autonomous vehicles to learn, reason and generalize from simulations into real-world scenarios.

Sheng’s research is built on three pillars: leveraging vision-language models to enhance autonomous vehicles’ ability to process and “understand” the world around them, embedding domain knowledge into the reinforcement learning process to make reinforcement learning-based driving policies safe and sample-efficient, and rigorously evaluating autonomous vehicle systems.

Sheng has published 19 journal articles, nine of which he has written as the first author or co-first author. His work has accrued more than 900 citations. One of his papers, “Graph-based spatial temporal convolution network for vehicle trajectory prediction in autonomous driving,” published in IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, achieved ESI Highly Cited Paper (top 1% in engineering) status in both 2024 and 2025. Sheng has also given 14 peer-reviewed conference presentations and has five manuscripts under review.

He’s known for collaboration, working closely with CEE Professor Sue Ahn’s and CEE Harvey D. Spangler Professor Xiaopeng Li’s lab groups on projects that connect his autonomous vehicle research to wider transportation systems research. These collaborations have led to multiple peer-reviewed publications.

Since joining Chen’s lab, Sheng has also earned a reputation as a patient and supportive mentor. He has worked extensively with CEE 370: Transportation Engineering as a grader and teaching assistant for four semesters, during which he supported the mentoring of more than 155 undergraduate students.

Beyond the classroom, Sheng has secured impressive internships. From November 2025 to April 2026, he completed an internship at Bosch Research, where he developed a vision-language-action model for end-to-end autonomous driving. He is interning with NVIDIA through summer 2026 to develop perception systems for autonomous vehicles.

“He has consistently demonstrated remarkable potential to advance the field of autonomous driving and intelligent transportation systems through his innovative work integrating multimodal foundation models, reinforcement learning and large-scale simulation,” wrote Civil and Environmental Engineering Professor and Chair Greg Harrington in his nomination letter. “He represents the high level of talent within the CEE graduate student body, and will help elevate the profile of the department, college and university wherever his future career and life lead him. I am confident that Zihao’s future will be as a world-class leader in next-generation research.”