Yu Zhang

Yu Zhang is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science & Engineering, Texas A&M University since January 2025. He earned his Ph.D. (2024) and M.Sc. (2019) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign under Prof. Jiawei Han, with a thesis winning the ACM SIGKDD Dissertation Award Runner-Up. Prior to UIUC, he obtained a B.Sc. (2017) at Peking University mentored by Prof. Yan Zhang.

• Research Focus: NLP & Data Mining for Science (Biology, Medicine, Math); Graph-structured Knowledge Integration; Weakly Supervised Learning
• Key Contributions: Chain-of-Factors for Paper-Reviewer Matching, Graph Chain-of-Thought for LLM Reasoning, Seed-Guided Topic Discovery
• Recent Trends: 2025 publications at ACL, WWW, EMNLP Findings on LLMs for Scientific Discovery

• Scientific Honors: ACM SIGKDD Dissertation Runner-Up (2025), Dissertation Completion Fellowship (2023), Yunni & Maxine Pao Fellowship (2022)

He serves as Area Chair for KDD 2025-2026 and Senior Area Chair at WSDM 2025. His lab develops tools like SKnowLLM for structured knowledge in LLMs and MLoG-GenAI for graph learning in general AI era.