Exploring AI safety & Physical AI
- Currently working on research in AI safety evaluation, VLA/RL & robotics manipulation, model optimisation/distillation and related areas while exploring opportunities to build or join a startup.
Dun Li Chan
Grokking & Hillclimbing · Based in Malaysia
About Me
I'm competitive by nature, agentic by habit.
Coming from a non-linear and under-resourced background, I started my journey at age 10 by teaching myself to hack a game website and jailbreak phones and eventually found my way to frontier AI research. And that itself has trained me to be highly adaptable at solving and learning from unfamiliar and hard problems, and most of the time, I'm obsessed with problems I truly care about.
I'm currently building on AI safety evals for LLMs and physical AI, mechanistic interpretability, and model inference optimisation/distillation. My research interest lies in understanding how the models work internally at the layer level, and how that understanding can push AI forward while keeping it safe and fast enough to deploy in real-world settings.
Places I've worked in: EleutherAI,
UniverseTBD, Shanghai Jiao Tong Uni.,
Uni. of Maryland, Metacreation Lab,
SEACrowd.
More about me click to expand
AI research
- Conducted AI research with multiple frontier labs after realising chemistry was not for me; mainly on mechanistic interpretability, NLP, and AI4Science projects, and published several papers in top conference workshops (see selected papers below)
- Founded MYResearchGuide & Malaysia Science Scholar's Programme as a side project, a non-profit organisation to help Malaysian youth discover science research opportunities, supported by 40+ researchers from top institutions (Ivy League and Oxbridge) to frontier industry labs (Meta AI and YC-backed startups), and sponsored by multiple companies and institutions including MathWorks (Owner of MATLAB)
Olympiads & STEM outreach
- Placed 3rd and 2nd in Malaysia Astronomy Olympiad selection rounds, represented Malaysia in IOAA and IAO, and now help as a problem setter for the national team selection.
- Served as a bootcamp instructor for the USA Astronomy Olympiad under Pandorax.
- Volunteer with AMISO as a committee member, co-directed Youth STEM Experimentation Camp 2025 (a 2-day MOE-approved nationwide competition with 500+ sign-ups), wrote astronomy questions for Youth STEM Cup 2026, and handled website maintenance as Technical Executive.
Biochemistry research
- Was part of my secondary school's science research team (under Universiti Sains Malaysia), where I developed a nanopesticide from biowaste materials to eradicate red flour beetles (Project abstract) and competed in the Malaysia ISEF national selection finals (Top 25).
- 2x represented my secondary school as a delegate (2023, 2024) in Science and Technology Symposium for Youths (STSY), a joint symposium hosted annually by my school and top schools from Asia; presented my research at the High School Affiliated to Xi'an Jiaotong University.
- Coached two junior teams, one of which won a 4th place grand award at ISEF.
Esports
- Top 200 in Apex Legends (Asia), Ascendant in Valorant, five-digit rank in osu!, and Conqueror in PUBG Mobile.
- Also burned about 500 hours getting through the entire Zelda series pre-Breath of the Wild.
Still a kid
- Around 400 hours in Roblox (mostly Arsenal), taught myself Kali Linux on a Raspberry Pi 4 I got for my birthday, and jailbroke half the phones in my house to overclock their CPU/GPU and learn how to install custom kernels and OS builds.
- I was part of my elementary school's robotics team, where I spent most of my time building with LEGO Mindstorms EV3; the team won third place at the National Robotics Competition (NRC).
Honours & Awards click to expand
Honours & Awards
- Malaysia Team — Intl. Olympiad on Astronomy and Astrophysics 2025 (IOAA)
- Ranked 3rd nationally (with 3 months of preparation)
- Malaysia Team — Intl. Astronomy Olympiad 2025 (IAO)
- Ranked 2nd nationally
- Gold medal - Malaysian Physics Olympiad 2024
- Attended the national team training camp
- Top 25 Finalist — Malaysia Science and Engineering Fair 2024 (PISTEK)
Miscellaneous
- YC Startup School 2026
- First and only Malaysian high schooler accepted
- Sigma Xi Scientific Honor Society Associate Member Nominee
- Penang State Government Young Talent Excellence Award Awardee
Selected work
My Project Board
- Shared Geometry Is Not Shared Physics: A Layerwise Test of the Platonic Representation Hypothesis in AstronomyNeurIPS 2026 Interpretability for Discovery Workshop (submitted)ongoing
- How Perturbations Propagate: A Multi-Level Analysis of Robustness in Large Language ModelsNeurIPS 2026 Interpscience Workshop Long Paper Track (submitted)[arxiv]ongoing
- Beyond Query Linearity: The Case for Nonlinear Queries.NeurIPS 2026 NeurReps Workshop Extended Abstracts Track & SLM-Agents Workshop Short Paper Track08/2026