With 2025 coming to a close, it is evident that The Grainger College of Engineering Siebel School of Computing and Data Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is home to many brilliant minds. This year, computer science professor Lingming Zhang was given the 2025 Google Academic Research Award.
The Google Academic Research Awards are meant to support groundbreaking research in the fields of computing and technology around the world. The awards are open to professors who advise students and conduct research at institutions like Illinois.
Zhang was named one of the 2025 recipients for his research proposal, Next-Generation Vulnerability Detection in the Era of LLM Agents. Through the award, Zhang’s proposal is to be supported by $100K to continue his research.
Zhang’s proposal mainly focuses on leveraging modern LLMs for software security and privacy research. His current research interests include software engineering, machine learning, programming languages, and formal methods.
Grainger Engineering Affiliations
Lingming Zhang is an Illinois Grainger Engineering associate professor of computer science.