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
- PhD, Machine Learning Department, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, 2020
Academic Positions
- Assistant Professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, August 2021 - Present
- Tenure-Track Assistant Professor, Siebel School of Computing and Data Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, August 2021 - Present
Documents
Other Professional Employment
- Long-Term Visitor, Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing, University of California Berkeley, August 2024 - December 2024
Research Interests
- AI for Science: cosmology and geospatial science
- Machine Learning
- Artificial Intelligence
Research Areas
Honors
- Outstanding Paper Award, EMNLP' 25 (2025)
- NSF CAREER Award (2025)
- Google Research Scholar Award (2024)
- AAAI New Faculty Highlights (2024 )
- Kavli Fellow, National Academy of Sciences (2023)
- Facebook Research Award (Statistics for Improving Insights, Models, and Decisions) (2021 )
- Alumni Gold Medal Award, University of Waterloo. (2015)
- Distinguished Graduate of Tsinghua University. (2013)
- Liu Jimin Scholarship, Tsinghua University. (2012)
- Google Excellence Scholarship. (2012)
Teaching Honors
- Teacher Ranked as Excellent, University of Illinois (2021-2023 )
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
- 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”.