2023: Swiss Physical Society award in Computational Physics sponsored by COMSOL, for ‘contributions to a modern theory of thermal transport in solids’.
2022: EPFL Doctorate Award, issued by the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne to up to three PhD theses per year, chosen over >400 STEM theses, to recognize research work of ‘exceptional quality’.
2020: Dimitris N. Chorafas Foundation Award, issued by the Weizmann Institute of Science (Israel) to recognize ‘research characterized by its high potential for practical applications’.
2017: Computational thinking award, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (Switzerland).
2015: IDEX Paris-Saclay scholarship, awarded by Université Paris-Saclay (France) to “students worldwide to enroll in a prestigious French master’s degree".
Best Paper Award (with supervised Ph.D. students Lei Huang and Weijia Cai) at the Canadian Society for Civil Engineering (CSCE) Annual Conference, Canada, 2022
Outstanding Dissertation Award, New York University, 2021
Editor's Choice Award by Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering, New York University, 2019
Inaugural class of Urban Doctoral Fellowship, New York University, 2018
Duan, K., Zou, Z. (2024). “Morphology Agnostic Gesture Mapping for Intuitive Teleoperation of Construction Robots”. Advanced Engineering Informatics, 62, 102600.
Huang, L., Cai, W., Zhu, Z., Zou, Z. (2023). “Dexterous manipulation of construction tools using anthropomorphic robotic hand”. Automation in Construction, 156, 105133.
Li, R., Zou, Z. (2023). “Enhancing Construction Robot Learning for Collaborative and Long-Horizon Tasks using Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning”. Advanced Engineering Informatics, 581 102140.
Duan, K., Suen, C., Zou, Z. (2023). “Robot morphology evolution for automated HVAC system inspections using graph heuristic search and reinforcement learning”. Automation in Construction, 153, 104956.
Cai, W., Huang, L., Zou, Z. (2023). “Actively-exploring thermography-enabled autonomous robotic system for detecting and registering HVAC thermal leaks”. Automation in Construction, 152, 104901.
Zhang, H. X., Zou, Z. (2023). “Quality assurance for building components through point cloud segmentation leveraging synthetic data”. Automation in Construction, 155, 105045.
Yu, X., Zou, Z., Ergan, S. (2023). “Extracting principal building variables from automatically collected façade images for energy conservation through deep transfer learning”. Applied Energy, 344, 121228.
Huang, L., Zhu, Z., Zou, Z. (2023). “To imitate or not to imitate: An integrated approach to boost reinforcement learning-based construction robotic control for long-horizon tasks using virtual demonstrations”. Automation in Construction, 146, 104691.
Zou, Z., Ergan, S. (2023). “Towards Emotionally Intelligent Buildings: A Convolutional Neural Network based Approach to Classify Human Emotional Experience in Virtual Built Environments.” Advanced Engineering Informatics, 55, 101868.
Ergan, S., Zou, Z., Bernardes, S. D., Zuo, F., Ozbay, K. (2022). “Developing an integrated platform to enable hardware-in-the-loop for synchronous VR, traffic simulation and sensor interactions.” Advanced Engineering Informatics, 51, 101476.
Zou, Z., Ergan, S. (2021). “Evaluating the effectiveness of biometric sensors and their signal features for classifying human experience in virtual environments.” Advanced Engineering Informatics, 49, 101358.
Zou, Z., Ergan, S., Fisher-Gewirtzman, D., Curtis, C. (2021). “Quantifying the Impact of Urban Form on Human Experience: An Experiment using Virtual Environments and Electroencephalogram.” ASCE Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering, 35(3), 04021004.
Zou, Z., Yu, X., Ergan, S. (2020). “Towards Optimal Control of Air Handling Units using Deep Reinforcement Learning and Recurrent Neural Network.” Building and Environment, 168, 106535.
Ergan, S., Radwan, A., Zou, Z., Tseng, H. A., Han, X. (2019). “Quantifying Human Experience in Architectural Spaces with Integrated Virtual Reality and Body Sensor Networks.” ASCE Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering, 33(2), 04018062.
Du, J., Zou, Z.., Shi, Y., Zhao, D. (2018). “Zero Latency: Real-time Synchronization of BIM Data in Virtual Reality for Collaborative Decision-making.” Automation in Construction, 85, 51-64.
Du, J., Shi, Y., Zou, Z., Zhao, D. (2018). “CoVR: Cloud-based Multiuser Virtual Reality Headset System for Project Communication of Remote Users.” ASCE Journal of Construction Engineering and Management, 144(2), 04017109.
Inaugural Recipient of the “IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society Innovative Education Award” (Feb. 2020)
Co-recipient of “Best Student Paper Award – 3rd Place” at the 2018 IEEE Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits (RFIC) Symposium for “An 8-Element, 1-3GHz Direct Space-to-Information Converter for Rapid, Compressive-Sampling Direction-of-Arrival Finding Utilizing Pseudo-Random Antenna-Weight Modulation” (with Matt Bajor)
Co-recipient “Best Demo Award” at the 2018 ACM/IEEE International Conference on the Internet of Things Design and Implementation (IoTDI) for “An Ultra-Low-Power Custom Integrated Circuit based Sound-Source Localization System” (with D. de Godoy, S. Xia, W. Fernandez, X. Jiang)
Co-recipient “Outstanding Student Paper – Runner up (2nd place)” at the 2017 IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference (CICC) for “A-236.3dB FoM Sub-Sampling Low-Jitter Supply-Robust Ring-Oscillator PLL for Clocking Applications with Feed-Forward Noise-Cancellation,” April 2018 (with S. Nagam)
Co-recipient “Best Poster Award” at the 2015 IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference (CICC) for "A Field-Programmable Noise-Canceling Wideband Receiver with High-Linearity Hybrid Class-AB-C LNTAs,” Sept. 2015 (with J. Zhu)
Co-recipient of the “Best Demo – Runner Up Award” at 14th ACM Conference on Embedded Network Sensor Systems (SenSys) Nov. 2016, (with R. Chandrasekaran, D. de Godoy, S. Xia, M. Islam, B. Islam, S. Nirjon, and X. Jiang)
Co-recipient of “Best Student Paper Award – 2nd Place” at the 2015 IEEE Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits (RFIC) Symposium (with Yang Xu)
Co-recipient of the “Student Poster Award 2nd Place” for “Metacapacitor: Large Area, Low Cost, High Performance Capacitors for Power Electronics,” FlexTech Alliance Conference, Feb. 2014 (with S. Yang, B. Van Tassell, C. Le, S. Liu, E. S. Leland, D. A. Steingart, S. O'Brien, and I. Kymissis)
Co-recipient of the “First Prize ($100K) in the 2012 Interdigital Innovation Challenge (I2C)” for “Ultrasonic Wireless Sensors” (with K. Yadav and I. Kymissis)
Co-recipient of the “2011 IEEE Communications Society Award for Advances in Communication” for an outstanding paper published in any IEEE Communications Society publication in the previous 15 years for the paper entitled “Energy-Harvesting Active Networked Tags (EnHANTs) for Ubiquitous Object Networking,” (with M. Gorlatova, I. Kymissis, D. Rubenstein, X. Wang and G. Zussman)
Co-recipient of the “Best Student Demo Award” for "Demo: Organic Solar Cell-equipped Energy Harvesting Active Networked Tag (EnHANT) Prototypes" at the ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (ACM SenSys) 2011 (with G. Stanje, P. Miller, J. Zhu, A. Smith, O. Winn, R. Margolies, M. Gorlatova, J. Sarik, M. Szczodrak, B. Vigraham, L. Carloni, I. Kymissis, and G. Zussman)
Co-recipient of the “First Prize in the 2009 Vodafone Americas Foundation Wireless Innovation Challenge” for “Active Networked Tags for Disaster Recovery Applications” (with G. Zussman, I. Kymissis, D. Rubenstein and X. Wang)
Co-recipient of “Best Student Paper Award – 1st Place” at the 2008 IEEE Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits (RFIC) Symposium (with F. Zhang and R. Gharpurey).
IBM Faculty Award (March 2005)
Award for the ‘Best Engineering thesis of Applied Sciences for the class of 1990’ (1 award among 360 students) at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium) granted by the class of 1965 (Oct. 1990).
(July 2016 – present) Bernard J. Lechner Professor of Electrical Engineering, Department of Electrical Engineering, Columbia University, New York (NY, USA).
(July 2017 – June 2020) Chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering, Columbia University, New York (NY, USA).
(July 2011 – June 2016) Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering, Columbia University, New York (NY, USA).
(July 2014 – June 2016) Vice Chair of Faculty Affairs, Department of Electrical Engineering, Columbia University, New York (NY, USA).
(July 2011 – July 2014) Director of Graduate Programs, Department of Electrical Engineering, Columbia University, New York (NY, USA).
(Oct. 2012 – 2014) Founding (co-)Chair of the Smart Cities Center in the Institute for Data Sciences and Engineering, Columbia University, New York (NY, USA).
(Sept. 2010 – Aug. 2011) Visiting Research Professor, Institut ICTEAM, Université Catholique de Louvain, Louvain la Neuve (Belgium).
(July 2002 – June 2011) Associate Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering, Columbia University, New York (NY, USA) [Tenure July 2008].
(April 2002 - June 2002)Principal Engineer at Multilink Corporation, Somerset (NJ, USA).
(Sept. 2000 - Jan. 2002) Director, VLSI in the ‘VLSI and Integrated Electro-optics Group’ of Celight Inc., Iselin (NJ, USA).
(July 1999 - August 2000) Senior Staff Scientist in the ‘Analog and RF Microelectronics Group’ of Broadcom Corporation, Irvine (CA, USA).
(Oct. 1996 - June 1999) Member of Technical Staff (Principal Investigator) in the ‘Design Principles Research Department’ of the ‘Wireless Laboratory’ at Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies, Murray Hill (NJ, USA).
(Sept. 1991 - Sept. 1996) Research assistant in the ESAT-MICAS laboratory of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Leuven (Belgium).
(Sept. 1990 - Aug. 1991) Belgian military service at the “Technical Department of the Army”, Peutie (Belgium).
(Spring 1998 and 2002) Adjunct Assistant Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering, Columbia University, New York (NY, USA).