Peter Chen

Peter Yichen Chen

Assistant Professor · UBC Computer Science · CAIDA AIM-SI · IAM

I build simulators of the 3D physical world to make physical AI possible.

Industry Partnerships

We team up with organizations — from startups to industry leaders like NVIDIA, Amazon, and Meta — to build simulations that tackle real-world science and engineering challenges.

Our Approach

These problems demand both AI that scales and deep physics knowledge tied to each application. We take a hybrid approach, combining the right mix of AI and physics to deliver real impact.

My collaborators and I work at the intersection of computer graphics, machine learning, scientific computing, and robotics. I'm a CS professor at UBC, where I direct the PhysAI Lab, and am part of the AI4Science cluster and the Institute of Applied Mathematics. Before this, I was a postdoc at MIT, did my CS PhD at Columbia, and studied math at UCLA.

Outside of work, I'm a foodie. If I'm not eating, I'm probably watching food videos and, sometimes, publishing food science papers. I travel for work and for food.