Thomas Tian (Ran Tian) is a Research Scientist with the Autonomous Systems and Physical AI Research (ASPIRE) Group at NVIDIA Research. He received his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, advised by Prof. Masayoshi Tomizuka and Prof. Andrea Bajcsy. His research focuses on embodied reasoning, world foundation models, and large-scale RL post-training, with an emphasis on safe alignment between embodied agents and humans across training, fine-tuning, and deployment.

During his Ph.D. he spent significant time at Waymo on driving foundation models, including pre-training, post-training preference alignment, and distillation for onboard deployment. He previously interned at WeRide, Honda Research Institute, and Qualcomm AI Research.

For more information, please visit his personal website.