Ziyu Chen is a Research Intern in the Autonomous Vehicle Research Group at Nvidia Research, and will begin his Ph.D. at Stanford University. His research focuses on neural representations and scene modeling, with a particular emphasis on leveraging representations such as Neural Radiance Fields and 3D Gaussians to model both indoor and large-scale dynamic urban environments. His work aims to develop photo-realistic simulators for embodied agents that bridge the sim-to-real gap, supporting closed-loop evaluation and training with a focus on safety, efficiency, and accuracy.