Ruochen (Esther) Zhao is a currently tenure-track Assistant Professor at the Information Systems Technology and Design (ISTD) pillar, Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD). She received her PhD in Artificial Intelligence from Nanyang Technological University (NTU), where she was fully supported by the AI.SG PhD Scholarship, under the mentorship of Professor Shafiq Joty and Professor Aixin Sun as part of the NTU-NLP group. Prior to her doctorate, she earned a Master of Science in Data Science from Harvard University and a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics from New York University. She has also held research positions at Apple Singapore and Alibaba DAMO Academy. Her primary research areas are natural language processing (NLP) and large language models (LLMs), with a focus on faithfulness, trustworthiness, and the development of explainable and reliable LLM Agents. She is particularly interested in knowledge-grounded generation, retrieval-augmented generation, and agentic LLM frameworks. She has published across top-tier AI venues including ACL, ICLR, EMNLP, and EACL.