Han Zhao
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Education
- Bachelor of Engineering, Computer Science, Tsinghua University, 2013
- Master of Mathematics, David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, 2015
- Doctor of Philosophy, Machine Learning Department, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, 2020
Academic Positions
- Long-Term Visitor, Modern Paradigms in Generalization, Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing, August 2024-December 2024
- Tenure-Track Assistant Professor, Siebel School of Computing and Data Science, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, August 2021-Present
- Affiliated Assistant Professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, August 2021-Present
Research Interests
- Neuro-symbolic AI
- Trustworthy Machine Learning
- Post-training & Alignment of Large Language Models
Research Areas
Other Outside Service
- Amazon Scholar, Amazon, May 2022 - Present
Honors
- Dean's Award for Excellence in Research, 2026
- Outstanding Paper Award, EMNLP, 2025 (2025)
- NSF CAREER Award, 2025 (2025)
- Google Research Scholar Award, 2024 (2024)
- AAAI New Faculty Highlights, 2024 (2024 )
- Kavli Fellow, National Academy of Sciences, 2023 (2023)
- Teacher Ranked as Excellent, University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, Fall 2021 (Fall 2021 )
- Facebook Research Award (Statistics for Improving Insights, Models, and Decisions), 2021 (2021 )
- Alumni Gold Medal Award, University of Waterloo, 2015 (2015)
- Distinguished Graduate of Tsinghua University, 2013 (2013)
- Liu Jimin Scholarship, Tsinghua University, 2012 (2012)
- Google Excellence Scholarship, 2012 (2012)
Recent Courses Taught
- CS 442 - Trustworthy Machine Learning
- CS 446 (ECE 449) - Machine Learning
- CS 498 ML3 (CS 498 MLG, CS 498 MLU) - Trustworthy ML
- CS 591 MLR - Machine Learning Reading Grp
- CS 591 MLR - ML Reading Group
- CS 598 FDS - Foundations of Data Science
- CS 598 HAZ (CS 598 HOF) - Transfer Learning
News Notes
- 3/10/2026
CS Assistant Professor Han Zhao has been awarded the 2026 Dean’s Award for Excellence in Research. The Grainger College of Engineering Faculty Awards recognize a select group of faculty innovators for their achievements.
- 11/7/2025
Illinois computer science professor Tong Zhang, assistant professor Han Zhao, and their students Jingyan Shen, Jiarui Yao, Rui Yang, Yifan Sun, Feng Luo, Rui Pan won the outstanding paper award at EMNLP’ 25 for the paper MiCRo: Mixture Modeling and Context-aware Routing for Personalized Preference Learning.
- 8/1/2025
CS professor Han Zhao has received two NSF grants. He received the prestigious NSF CAREER award for his research on “Efficient and Trustworthy Machine Learning via Post-Processing. Zhao is also the recipient of an NSF CISE CORE award for “Small: Neural Probabilistic Circuits: Towards Compositional and Interpretable Neuro-Symbolic AI”.