Yu Zhang

Yu Zhang is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at Texas A&M University, leading the SKY Lab. He holds a Ph.D. and M.Sc. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), advised by Jiawei Han, and a B.Sc. from Peking University. His research focuses on NLP and data mining for scientific domains, graph-augmented NLP, and weakly supervised learning. He has been recognized with the ACM SIGKDD Dissertation Award Runner-Up and multiple outstanding reviewer awards.

• Education:
  • Ph.D. and M.Sc. in Computer Science, UIUC (201X-201X)
  • B.Sc. in Computer Science, Peking University (201X-201X)
• Professional Roles:
  • PC Area Chair for KDD 2026, ACL 2025, NeurIPS 2025
  • Co-organizer of SKnowLLM and MLoG-GenAI workshops

His research interests span NLP applications in biology, medicine, and mathematics; graph-based NLP techniques; and LLMs under weak supervision. He has published extensively in top venues like ACL, KDD, and EMNLP, focusing on scientific LLMs, knowledge graphs, and automated reasoning.

Key awards include the ACM SIGKDD Dissertation Award Runner-Up (2025) and multiple best paper/poster awards. He teaches graduate courses on NLP for Science (CSCE 689) and Information Storage and Retrieval (CSCE 670).