Orr Zohar

Bio

Orr Zohar is a PhD candidate in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University and a Knight-Hennessy Scholar. He builds large-scale multimodal foundation models - spanning data curation, pretraining, and post-training - with a focus on video understanding, long-horizon reasoning, and robust transfer under real-world distribution shift. His work includes open-source model and dataset efforts and methods for evaluation and alignment of multimodal systems, with an emphasis on turning research into deployment-ready learning systems.

Before Stanford, he earned a BSc in Chemical Engineering (summa cum laude) and an MSc in Electrical Engineering from the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology, and worked as a machine learning and algorithms engineer at proteanTecs. Earlier research experiences include applied sensing and medical-imaging work.

Honors & Awards

• Knight Hennessy scholars fellowship, Knight Hennessy scholars (2021)
• Intuitive Surgical Best Poster at the SCIEN Industry Affiliates Meeting, SCIEN (2021)
• 1st place in the student’s poster competition, The Wearable Devices for Medical Diagnosis conference (2019)
• The Norman and Barbra Sieden family prize for multi-disciplinary undergraduate student projects, The Norman and Barbra Sieden family foundation (2018)
• BAZAN Group Scholarship, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology (2018)

Education & Certifications

• MEE, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Electrical engineering (2021)
• BSc, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Chemical engineering (2019)