Zilong is a Mechanical Engineering Ph.D. student at the HERD Lab. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Resource Recycling Science and Engineering from Hunan Normal University in 2017, and a master’s degree in Materials Science from the Changsha Research Institute of Mining and Metallurgy in 2020, where his research focused on lithium-ion batteries. He then spent half a year as a research assistant at Fudan University, working on metal-organic chemistry. From 2021 to 2023, Zilong worked as a research assistant at the Guangdong Technion–Israel Institute of Technology, continuing his research on lithium-ion batteries. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where his research focuses on protonic ceramic electrolysis cells.