SMU | Zerui "Jerry" Ma's personal website

Awarded Moody Graduate Fellowship & Starting Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I am honored to receive the Moody Graduate Fellowship from Southern Methodist University and begin my Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering at the Lyle School of Engineering.

My doctoral research will focus on quantum machine learning and power flow optimization.

GraphRAG and Agentic Optimization for Student Curriculum Planning

Mon, 05 May 2025 13:00:00 +0000

Speaker (30-minute Talk) at the SMU Mayer Research Presentation, Dallas, TX. Supported by the Dedman College Interdisciplinary Institute.

Graduate Teaching Assistant (Machine Learning, Advanced Python, Digital Logic)

Wed, 15 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Graduate Teaching Assistant — Southern Methodist University

Lyle School of Engineering
January 2025 – May 2026 | Dallas, TX

Courses Supported

Machine Learning (Undergraduate / Graduate)
Advanced Python Programming
Digital Logic Design & Hardware Laboratories

Key Responsibilities

Instructed and mentored over 100+ students in fundamental and advanced Machine Learning concepts, including gradient descent optimization, loss functions, neural network architectures, and transformer attention mechanisms.
Led weekly hands-on coding laboratories and office hours, guiding students through implementing machine learning models from scratch in Python, PyTorch, and scikit-learn.
Designed curriculum and laboratory experiments for digital systems and VLSI testing, directing students in implementing JTAG boundary-scan controllers and debugging Verilog HDL on Xilinx FPGAs.

Automated Degree Planning with Intelligent Agent Infrastructures

Fri, 25 Oct 2024 11:00:00 +0000

Speaker (15-minute Talk) at the SMU Fall Research Symposium, Dallas, TX.