I am a final-year Ph.D candidate in the Department of Applied Mathematics at the University of Waterloo, where I am fortunate to be advised by Prof. Jun Liu. Prior to joining Waterloo, I recevied my M.ASc degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Ottawa, and my B.Eng. degree in Vehicle Engineering alongside a B.A. degree in Economics (double major) from Chongqing University.

My primary research interests lie at the intersection of machine learning and control systems, including learning-based stability analysis with formal guarantees, operator learning for nonlinear dynamical systems, and learning-based control with applications in robotics.

Selected Publications

Below is a selection of my publications. For full publications, see Papers or my Google Scholar.

* denotes equal contribution

• Learning Regions of Attraction in Unknown Dynamical Systems via Zubov-Koopman Lifting: Regularities and Convergence
  Yiming Meng, Ruikun Zhou, and Jun Liu
  IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, 2025

• Physics-Informed Neural Network Policy Iteration: Algorithms, Convergence, and Verification
  Yiming Meng*, Ruikun Zhou*, Amartya Mukherjee, Maxwell Fitzsimmons, Christopher Song, and Jun Liu
  International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2024

• Physics-Informed Extreme Learning Machine Lyapunov Functions
  Ruikun Zhou, Maxwell Fitzsimmons, Yiming Meng, and Jun Liu
  IEEE Control Systems Letters, Vol. 8: 1763–1768, 2024

• A Model-Free Kullback-Leibler Divergence Filter for Anomaly Detection in Noisy Data Series
  Ruikun Zhou, Wail Gueaieb, Davide Spinello
  Journal of Dynamic Systems, Measurement, and Control (ASME), 145(2), 2023

• Neural Lyapunov Control of Unknown Nonlinear Systems with Stability Guarantees
  Ruikun Zhou, Thanin Quartz, Hans De Sterck, and Jun Liu
  Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2022

Teaching

Instructor

University of Waterloo
2023 Fall Term

• MATH 115 Linear Algebra for Engineering

Teaching Assistant

University of Waterloo
2021 - 2025

• MATH 114, 115, 118, 128, 136, 225, 235, 237 & SYDE 111 Various Linear Algebra and Calculus courses
• AMATH 250 Introduction to Differential Equations
• AMATH 242/CS 371 Introduction to Computational Math
• AMATH 455/655 Control Theory

Teaching Assistant

University of Ottawa
2018 - 2020

• MCG 3306 System Dynamics (Control I)
• MCG 4308 Mechanical Vibration
• MCG 4328 Manufacturing

Awards

• NSERC Postdoctoral Fellowship (2026-)
• Queen Elizabeth II Graduate Scholarship in Science and Technology (QEII-GSST) (2025-2026)
• President’s Graduate Scholarship (2025-2026)
• Graduate Research Paper Award, Department of Applied Mathematics, University of Waterloo (2024)
• Women in Mathematics (WiM) Directed Reading Program Mentorship Award, Faculty of Mathematics, University of Waterloo (2023 & 2024)
• Ontario Graduate Fellowship, Faculty of Mathematics, University of Waterloo (2023 Winter term)
• Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award, Department of Applied Mathematics, University of Waterloo (2023)
• National Scholarship (2012)

Professional Service and Activities

Reviewer

Conferences

• IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), 2023, 2025
• Learning for Dynamics & Control Conference (L4DC), 2025
• NeurIPS, 2024
• American Control Conference (ACC), 2023-2025

Journals

• Automatica
• ASME Journal of Dynamic Systems, Measurement and Control

Mentorship

Women in Mathematics Directed Research Program, University of Waterloo

• Neural network-based stability analysis for dynamical systems (2024 Spring Term)
  • Mentees: Gengyang Chen and Jiaren Yue
• Neural network-based stability analysis for dynamical systems (2023 Winter Term)
  • Mentee: Zaheer Mohideen

Technical Committee

• IEEE CSS Technical Committee on Hybrid Systems
• IEEE CSS Technical Committee on Robust and Complex Systems (ROCS)

Others

• Tohoku University Engineering Summer Program (TESP) — Robotics, Japan, 2018