About Ethan Shen

Ethan Shen was born in Seattle, Washington. His parents emigrated from China to the United States after living through the Cultural Revolution, arriving with nothing more than a few personal belongings. In America, they found a place where they had the freedom to shape their careers and lives as they saw fit, pursuing doctoral degrees in oceanography and physics.

Ethan grew up in Seattle at a time when its suburbs were being reshaped by the city’s booming internet industry. Surrounded by technology, Ethan witnessed firsthand how it enabled better education, safer infrastructure, and higher quality of life.

These experiences inspired Ethan to study computer science at the University of Washington. After exploring a variety of interests that ranged from particle physics to acoustic levitation, he became involved in artificial intelligence research in the spring of his freshman year.

Since then, Ethan has led and published projects focused on evaluating vision models, improving vision-language reasoning, and increasing efficiency in large language models. His undergraduate research has been published in leading machine learning conferences such as Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems and The IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. Outside of research, he has been a part of the department faculty hiring committee and Student Advisory Council.

Ethan graduated after three years in order to continue as a PhD student at the University of Washington, where he is advised by Professor Ali Farhadi. His current research focuses on developing affordable and open-source coding agents. Ethan recently led the development of SERA, a suite of leading coding agents and training datasets, with media coverage from outlets like GeekWire, AI Business, and Nvidia AI. In the future, Ethan plans to continue working on agents for long horizon tasks and scientific discovery, as well as novel model architectures. Through this, Ethan hopes to contribute to a world where frontier intelligence is accessible and useful to as many people as possible.