William Wang

William Wang

I'm a PhD student at Stanford, advised by Kayvon Fatahalian. I also collaborate closely with Karen Liu and Scott Delp.

My research focuses on building high-performance, high-fidelity biomechanics simulations and training RL control policies for these high-dimensional action spaces. I wrote Bolt, a biomechanics simulator that runs at 1000x real-time. Currently I'm also interested in using differentiable simulation for system identification.

Before Stanford, I did my undergrad at Cornell, advised by Itai Cohen and Jim Sethna. During that time, I also worked with R. Stephen Craxton.

Selected publications

  1. Learning Realistic Athletic Sprinting Without Demonstrations
    William Wang, Nicholas Bianco, Guy Tevet, and 4 more authors
    SIGGRAPH Asia 2026 paper project
  2. Providing Rapid Design Feedback for 3D Obstacle Course Games Using Constrained Solvability Queries
    Zander Majercik, Sharon Zhang, William Wang, and 6 more authors
    SIGGRAPH Asia 2026 paper project
  3. CuGen: A GPU-accelerated framework for large-scale genomics
    Tuomo Kiiskinen, Joshua Richland, William Wang, and 5 more authors
    In submission preprint project
  4. Rigidity transitions in anisotropic networks: a crossover scaling analysis
    William Wang, Stephen J. Thornton, Bulbul Chakraborty, and 7 more authors
    Soft Matter paper
  5. Pentagonal prism spherical hohlraums for OMEGA
    William Wang, and Stephen Craxton
    Physics of Plasmas paper
  6. A New Beam Configuration to Support both Spherical Hohlraums and Symmetric Direct Drive
    R. Stephen Craxton, William Wang, and Michael E. Campbell
    APS DPP slides

Blog

I'll write half-baked thoughts here

Writing a physics engine
An articulated rigid-body dynamics engine built from first principles.
  1. Introduction
  2. What are degrees of freedom?
  3. Rotations and orientations
  4. Free-body accelerations
  5. Mass matrix

Side projects

Just some random projects before the days of vibe-coding