Yuanjia (Scott)
Yang
a.k.a. Rheya · they/them
PhD student · Neurosciences · UC San Diego
I'm a first-year Neurosciences PhD student at UC San Diego, working in Talmo Pereira's lab at the Salk Institute. I build neuromechanical simulation tools that let virtual animals learn naturalistic behavior — bridging deep reinforcement learning, biomechanics, and motor neuroscience.
neuroAI motor control biomechanics deep RL virtual rodents
Selected Work
All research projects →MIMIC-MJX: Neuromechanical Emulation of Animal Behavior
C.Y. Zhang*, Y. Yang*, A. Sirbu
Under Review at Nature Methods · 2025 Under Review
Recent
Writing →Mar 2026
Presented two posters at Cosyne 2026 — MIMIC-MJX and Musculoskeletal Imitation Learning.
Nov 2025
Submitted MIMIC-MJX to Nature Methods (co-first author).
Sep 2025
Started PhD in Neurosciences at UC San Diego, joining the Talmo Pereira Lab at the Salk Institute.