Executive Board
Meet the leadership team driving AI@Penn's mission forward
Hans Zhu
Founder, Co-President
Hansheng Zhu is a junior in Penn Engineering's AI Program and the Founder/Co-President of AI@Penn. He contributes to open-source projects in computer vision and LLM systems (e.g., SciChartVision for scientific-figure understanding) and has shipped cloud-deployed ML services. Originally a Math Olympiad competitor and clarinet soloist from Hong Kong, he now builds AI tools to democratize music learning. His research interests include multimodal learning (vision-language models), resilient software design, and health/biomedical AI. He recently co-authored a paper on vision-language models stemming from his dense captioning project. Hansheng has held roles with the Penn Summer AI Lab as a Backend Engineer, Astoria AI as a Software Developer, and Thomas Jefferson University Hospital as a Deep Learning Research Intern. He oversees the Research and Development branches.
Sean Lee
Co-Founder, Co-President
Sean Lee is a junior at Wharton, concentrating in Finance and Entrepreneurship & Innovation. He is the Co-Founder and Co-President of AI@Penn, and serves as Vice President of Operations for the AI Business Club (AIBC). Sean serves on the Wharton AI & Analytics Initiative Student Advisory Board, the Admissions Dean's Advisory Board and is a Youth Ambassador for the United Nations in the Asia-Pacific region. He has spoken at the UN General Assembly Summit of the Future on AI's role in building a sustainable global economy, and at the StartmeupHK Festival, Asia's leading InnoTech event, on integrating AI into corporate training and education. Sean is passionate about using AI to enhance consumer and retail experiences, and previously founded an AI chatbot startup for legal contract automation. He oversees the Entrepreneurship, Outreach, Operations and GBM branches.
Olee Banerjee
Vice President, Development
Olee Banerjee is a junior majoring in Artificial Intelligence with a concentration in Robotics and a minor in Mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania's School of Engineering and Applied Science. She serves as the Vice President of the Development branch at AI@Penn, focusing on creating impactful AI applications and technical solutions. Her technical experience spans machine learning, scalable cloud computing, and full-stack development - including work reconstructing particle masses from CERN collision data using neural networks, building distributed data pipelines, and developing predictive models. Beyond engineering, Olee is Program Director for Penn's Women in Computer Science (WiCS), supporting mentorship and outreach programs, and Show Director for Penn Naach, the university's South Asian fusion dance team. Olee's interests lie in applied machine learning and robotics, and she aims to create intelligent systems that are both technically robust and socially meaningful.
Zach Harpaz
Vice President, Research
Zachary Harpaz is a sophomore pursuing a BSE in Artificial Intelligence in the School of Engineering and Applied Science. He is serving as the Vice President of the Research branch of AI@Penn. Zachary has published research leveraging AI for cancer drug discovery, including work on target identification for Glioblastoma Multiforme at Insilico Medicine, and logic-gated CAR-T therapy design at NYU Langone's Perlmutter Cancer Center. He has presented his findings at international conferences in Spain and Denmark. Beyond academia, Zachary is the Co-Founder and CEO of Ocura, a healthcare technology startup building a universal patient portal that unifies data from any electronic health record system into one AI-powered platform. Zachary's overarching goal is to leverage AI to improve human health and everyday life.
Monica Lama
Co-Vice President, Outreach
Monica Lama is a junior in Penn Engineering's AI Program and founding member of AI@Penn, where she serves as Co-Vice President of Outreach, building partnerships within the industry. Monica's research spans multi-agent systems and vision-language evaluation, and recently co-authored a paper on dense image captioning under Penn's NLP Group. Currently, her main projects include building multilingual captioning pipelines and designing LLM-based agents for an algorithmic trading platform. She has developed transformer-based agents for Crypto trading, built economic forecasting tools for the SB bank, and is now focusing her efforts towards ML research. Originally from Miami, she blends her background in mathematics and computer science with her passion for globally inclusive AI systems.
Yash Samat
Co-Vice President, Outreach
Yash Samat is a sophomore studying AI at SEAS and serves as Co-Vice President of Outreach for AI@Penn. He loves building with AI, especially when ideas turn into products that make a real-world difference. His projects have ranged from decision-making models and crowd wisdom to ocean conservation work and multi-agent systems for automation. Yash is most engaged where technology, research, and entrepreneurship overlap, particularly at the point where data and design meet. His main goal is to start a company, so you will always find him prototyping, gathering feedback, and learning quickly with teammates who want to push what's possible. He cares about human-centered outcomes and tries to pair rigorous engineering with clear, accessible product thinking. On campus, he focuses on connecting students, partners, and opportunities to strengthen the AI@Penn community.
Evan Schaffer
Vice President, Entrepreneurship
Evan Schaffer is a junior studying Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics. He serves as Vice President of Entrepreneurship for AI@Penn. He is currently pursuing projects in mechatronics and the rapidly emerging robotics industry. Evan is passionate about engineering entrepreneurship—he views business initiative and values-based leadership as the essential bridge between technology and genuine impact. He also serves as Curriculum Development Chair for Access Engineering, where he trains the program to teach engineering fundamentals to Philadelphia high school students.
Oliver Li
Vice President, Finance
Oliver Li is a junior pursuing a dual degree at The Wharton School and the School of Engineering and Applied Science, concentrating in Finance and Computer Science. He currently serves as the Vice President of Finance at AI@Penn. In addition, he serves as Chief Financial Officer and Chairman of the Board at the University of Pennsylvania Students Federal Credit Union, where he leads strategic initiatives and oversees institutional investment operations. Oliver is an incoming Summer Analyst at Octagon Credit Investors and has previously interned at Eldridge Capital Management and Pan Capital Management, focusing on private credit, structured finance, and quantitative research. He is passionate about credit investing, particularly within opportunistic and distressed strategies, and is interested in how artificial intelligence and data-driven models can transform credit markets, risk management, and event-driven investing.
Quinn Tang
Vice President, Operations
Quinn Tang is a junior at Wharton, concentrating in Finance and Legal Studies. He currently serves as the Vice President of Operations at AI@Penn. His professional interests lie in private equity secondaries, distressed investing, and the application of AI-driven quantitative methods to value structured credit and exotic securities. Quinn previously interned in Debt Capital Markets at BNP Paribas and Financial Restructuring at Houlihan Lokey, and he will be joining Evercore in New York next summer. In his free time, Quinn enjoys staying active through soccer, basketball, hiking, golf, and workouts, and loves exploring new restaurants around Philly. He oversees the Operations branch at AI@Penn, ensuring smooth coordination and execution of club activities and initiatives.
Nond Phokasub
Vice President, GBM Engagement
Nond Phokasub is a junior at Penn engineering, studying Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics. He is the Vice President of GBM Engagement of AI@Penn and serves as a designer in the Red division of Penn Spark. Nond has contributed to AI in education through his Unplugged Robotics Project where he invented unplugged games to teach and help make basic Computer Science more tangible to students in rural areas without the need for computers, spreading an impact in over 120 schools in Thailand. He has spoken at the 'Future Trends in Education' webinar organized by the Embassy of Finland in Bangkok and the Thai-Finnish Chamber of Commerce about his unplugged approach to teaching basic Computer Science.