Chuchu Fan
Associate Professor, Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics

Who they work with
Chuchu Fan is an associate professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics with an appointment in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) at MIT. She leads the Reliable Autonomous Systems Lab (REALM). Fan’s research focuses on using rigorous mathematics, including formal methods, machine learning, and control theory for the design, analysis, and verification of safe autonomous systems. Fan received her PhD in computer engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and BE in automation from Tsinghua University, China.
Selected Publications
- Chen, Y., Jhamtani, H., Sharma, S., Fan, C., & Wang, C. (2025). Steering large language models between code execution and textual reasoning. International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR).
- Chen, Y., Hao, Y., Zhang, Y., & Fan, C. (2025). Code-as-Symbolic-Planner: Foundation model-based robot planning via symbolic code generation. In Proceedings of the 2025 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS).
- Hao, Y., Chen, Y., Zhang, Y., & Fan, C. (2025). Large language models can solve real‑world planning rigorously with formal verification tools. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers) (pp. 3434–3483). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Media
- July 17, 2025: MIT News, This “smart coach” helps LLMs switch between text and code
- June 10, 2025: MIT News, Inroads to personalized AI trip planning
- April 2, 2025: MIT News, Researchers teach LLMs to solve complex planning challenges