By Emily Aronson, Office of Communications
Computer science student James Zhang, Class of 2025, has been named a Schwarzman Scholar. He will attend a one-year, fully funded master’s degree program in global affairs at Tsinghua University in Beijing.
Zhang is one of three Princeton seniors to win this honor. They are among 150 students representing 38 countries and 105 universities, according to the scholarship announcement. "This year’s selected Scholars are keenly interested in learning about China and broadening their understanding of global affairs, which are both now more important than ever," said Stephen A. Schwarzman, founding trustee of Schwarzman Scholars, in the announcement.
The Schwarzman Scholar Class of 2025-26 was selected from a pool of nearly 5,000 candidates worldwide. The scholars will begin their studies in August.
Zhang, from Basking Ridge, New Jersey, is majoring in computer science and pursuing minors in linguistics and in statistics and machine learning.
He is president emeritus of the Princeton Entrepreneurship Club, a student organization with which he’s been involved since his first year. His senior thesis research focuses on digitizing historical documents with large language models.
Zhang hopes to pursue a career as an AI researcher-entrepreneur and said in his application essay that his year as a Schwarzman Scholar will “enhance my ability to improve global AI safety discourse.”
On campus, Zhang has served as an assistant instructor and lead teaching assistant for the Department of Computer Science. He is an organizer for the student group Princeton AI Alignment, which focuses on AI safety, and he is also a member of New College West.
He also has experience as a machine learning research assistant at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and as a research intern with the Cooperative Institute for Modeling the Earth System, a collaboration between Princeton and the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory.
He was the founder of the nonprofit Linguage, which promoted the study of linguistics through educational activities for high school students. He is currently a team member with Innovation for Everyone, which is developing an AI critical-thinking guide for secondary school administrators.