Yizhou Sun

2016 Early Career Academic Achievement Alumni Award

Yizhou Sun joined the computer science faculty at UCLA in July 2016. Her principal research interest is in mining information and social networks, and more generally in data mining, machine learning, and network science, with a focus on modeling novel problems and proposing scalable algorithms for real-world applications.

She started her academic career in 2013 as an assistant professor at Northeastern University’s College of Computer and Information Science, where she earned an NSF CAREER award in 2015 to analyze heterogeneous information networks by addressing human factor-related questions. Sun has published more than 60 papers in journals and at major conferences; she has also co-authored a book—Mining Heterogeneous Information Networks: Principles and Methodologies—with CS Professor Jiawei Han, her former doctoral advisor.

As a CS @ ILLINOIS graduate student, she presented data mining tutorials at several premier conferences, including the EDBT 2009, SIGMOD 2010, and KDD 2010, and she has continued teaching tutorials as a faculty member. She received the 2012 ACM SIGKDD Best Student Paper Award, 2013 ACM SIGKDD Doctoral Dissertation Award, and 2013 Yahoo ACE (Academic Career Enhancement) Award.