Dawei Zhou

Dr. Dawei Zhou is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at Virginia Tech and Director of the VirginiaTech Learning on Graphs (VLOG) Lab. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and focuses on Open-World Machine Learning (OpenML), with applications in material science, finance, healthcare, and AI safety. His research has been supported by NSF, DARPA, and industry partners like Amazon and Google.

His work addresses challenges in long-tailed learning, graph neural networks, and agentic AI for scientific discovery. Notable contributions include benchmarks like MetamatBench and DISPROTBENCH, and frameworks like MentorGNN and UnifiedGT. Awards include the NSF Career Award (2024) and Virginia Tech’s Outstanding Assistant Professor Award (2025).

• Education: Ph.D., Computer Science, UIUC
• Grants: NSF, DARPA, Commonwealth Cyber Initiative
• Service Roles: Vice Program Chair (KDD 2023), Proceedings Chair (SIGKDD 2024)
• Lab: VLOG Lab focuses on hypothesis generation/validation, LLM safety, and open-world learning

Recent articles emphasize scientific hypothesis validation, LLM generalization, and fair graph learning. Students with CS, statistics, or physics backgrounds are recruited for Ph.D. and postdoc roles.