Hi, I am Lan Emily Zhang. I am an assistant professor at the Department of ECE, Clemson University. I was an assistant professor at the Department of ECE, Michigan Technological University (MTU). I received my Ph.D. from the University of Florida (UF).

My research interest spans the areas of wireless communications, distributed machine learning, cybersecurity, Internet-of-Things (IoT), and cyber-physical systems (CPS). 

I am always looking for highly motivated Ph.D. students interested in solving real-world machine learning, cyber-physical systems, wireless communications, and cybersecurity challenges (full financial support as RA). If interested, please send me your CV, transcript(s), GRE, TOEFL (international applicants only), and sample publications, if any. 

For students at Clemson, multiple paid part-time and volunteer research assistant positions are available. If you are interested, please send me your CV and transcripts (unofficial copies are acceptable).

News

• [grant] 04/26: I am excited to receive the prestigious NSF CAREER award! Look forward to exploring and collaborating on wireless for AI. 

• [paper] 03/26: Our work on acoustic environmental matching has been accepted by IEEE ICME 2026. 

• [service] xx/26: Happy to join two NSF Panel discussions.

• [paper] 02/26: Our work on robust collaborative inference has been accepted by CVPR 2026.

• [paper] 11/25: Our work on foundation model security has been accepted by IEEE SEC 2025.

• [paper] 11/25: Our work on hardware secure federated learning has been accepted by WACV 2026.

• [paper] 11/25: One paper about driving safety has been accepted by AAAI 2026. 

• [paper] 11/25: One paper about semantic communications for UAV/UGV path planning has been accepted by IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology (TVT). 

• [service] 10/25: Excited to join the editorial board of IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications (TWC, Impact Factor: 10.7) as an Associate Editor. Looking forward to seeing your great work at TWC!

• [service] 09/25: Happy to receive multiple certificates of recognition from IEEE Transactions on Computers, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, and IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, respectively, for my contributions as a regular reviewer.

• [paper] 08/25: Two papers about Retrieval-Generated Augmentation (RAG) and LLMs have been accepted by EMNLP 2025, the main conference (acceptance rate 22.16%). Congrats to Gaurav!

• [paper] 08/25: One paper about AI safety has been accepted by ACM CCS 2025.

• [paper] 08/25: One paper about UAV-aware semantic communications has been accepted by IEEE Globecom 2025. 

• [service] 07/25: Excited to join the editorial board of IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering (TNSE, Impact Factor: 7.9) as an Associate Editor. Looking forward to seeing your great work at TNSE!

• [paper] 06/25: Our paper on modulation-aware semantic communications has been accepted by IEEE Transactions on Communications with an impact factor of 8.3.  

• [paper] 05/25: Our paper on RL-based sample-efficient Deep Brain Stimulation has been accepted by IEEE IMC 2025. Congratulations to Harsh, our Master’s researcher!

More news here!