Heng Ji

Heng Ji is a Professor at the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science, affiliated with the Department of Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, and multiple research labs including the Coordinated Science Laboratory and Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She serves as an Amazon Scholar and Founding Director of the Amazon-Illinois Center on AI for Interactive Conversational Experiences (AICE) and CapitalOne-Illinois Center on AI Safety and Knowledge Systems (ASKS).

• B.A. and M.A. in Computational Linguistics from Tsinghua University
• M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from New York University

Her research bridges Natural Language Processing with Vision-Language Models, Knowledge-Enhanced LLMs, and AI for Science (e.g., chemical language modeling). She leads major multi-institutional projects such as DARPA ECOLE MIRACLE, KAIROS RESIN, and DEFT Tinker Bell, while advising governments (U.S. Air Force Data Analytics Expert Panel) and industry (Amazon, Google, IBM). Her work on multimodal reasoning, agent-based systems, and chemical language models (e.g., mCLM) has been supported by NSF, DARPA, and corporate partners.

Recent publications (2025) focus on LLM agents, vision-language integration, and scientific knowledge acquisition. Awards include NSF CAREER, IEEE Intelligent Systems' AI's 10 to Watch, and multiple Outstanding Paper Awards at ACL/NAACL. She advises students like Chi Han (ACL/NAACL awardee) and post-docs Xiusi Chen and Yuji Zhang, and leads the BLENDER Lab, which develops frameworks like WiNELL (Wikipedia updating) and ProteinZero (protein generation). She has also served as NAACL Secretary and Program Co-Chair for ACL-IJCNLP2022.

• Outstanding Paper Award at ACL2024
• Two Outstanding Paper Awards at NAACL2024
• Young Scientist by World Laureates Association (2023-2024)
• AI's 10 to Watch by IEEE (2013)
• NSF CAREER (2009)
• Google/IBM/Bosch Research Awards