Aston Zhang is a Staff Research Scientist at Meta, leading efforts in designing and training large language models as a core contributor to the Llama team since 2023. Prior to this role, Aston served as a Scientist & Manager at Amazon Web Services from 2017 to 2023, focusing on AI Research. Previous experience includes research internships at Google and Microsoft in 2016 and 2012, respectively, and an internship at UBS in 2011. Aston holds a Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in Computer Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.