I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech (VT), and a faculty member of the Sanghani Center for Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics.

I develop scalable and reliable foundation models and agentic systems for autonomous decision-making under real-world constraints. My work is motivated by high-stakes domains such as science and healthcare. My work has been recognized by the NSF CAREER Award (2025), NVIDIA Academic Grant (2025), Cisco Research Award (2025-2026), and the NAACL Best Demo Paper Award (2021). Our research is sponsored by NSF, NIH, USDA, and generous gifts from Nvidia, Amazon, and Cisco.

I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) under the supervision of Dr. Jiawei Han. During my Ph.D. study, I also worked at IBM Research as a summer intern. I received my M.S. in Statistics and my M.S. in Biochemistry from UIUC. I received my B.S. in Biological Science from Tsinghua University, China.

News and Highlights

• (8/29/26) We are grateful to receive an NIH NIBIB R01 grant (4 years, $2.79M total; PI: Dr. Aiguo Han) for the project Advancing Pulse-Echo Speed-of-Sound Imaging: Toward Accurate, Robust, and Fast Methods for Practical Use.
• (8/21/26) We are grateful to receive an NSF NAIRR Pilot award (1 year, 20K GPU Hours on NCSA Delta) for the project Efficient Multimodal Long Context Reasoning via Parameter Generation.
• (8/21/26) Two papers are accepted by EMNLP’26. Congratulations to my student Jun for their work on multi-agent error detection and attribution with causal graph building!
• (8/19/26) I am honored to receive the VT CS Rising Star Researcher Award!
• (8/8/26) We are excited to present a tutorial of Towards The Science of Multi-Agent Communication at NeurIPS 2026! Looking forward to seeing everyone in Atlanta in December!
• (7/22/26) We are grateful to receive an NSF PCL-Test Bed grant (4 years, $20M total; PI: Dr. Rose Hu) for the project AI-enabled, Cloud-based Self-Driving Nanofabrication Node for Accelerating Semiconductor Research and Education.
• (7/22/26) We are grateful to receive an NIH NIA R21 grant (2 years, $460K total; PI: Dr. Huaiyang Zhong) for the project Advancing Chronic Pain Care in Rural Seniors: Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing to Improve Understanding, Assessment, and Comorbidity Risk Prediction.
• (4/30/26) Three papers are accepted by ICML’26. Congratulations to my students Gaurav, Yi, and Priya for their work on SLM agentic framework, foundation model architecture search, and multi-agent coordination under real-world conditions without ground truth!
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Prospective Students

My lab at Virginia Tech has openings for PhD/MS students, Postdoc researchers, and research internship opportunities for undergraduate students.

We are interested in students with strong backgrounds in machine learning, deep learning, large language models, and systems for AI. Prior experience in areas such as efficient training/inference, multimodal learning, or agent-based systems is a plus.

Please email me (with your CV) if you are interested in working with me. Due to the high volume of emails, I may not be able to respond to every inquiry.

• For prospective PhD students outside of VT, please include my name as one of your interested faculty members in your application so I can easily locate your materials during the review process.
• For current VT students, the best way to learn more about our research is to attend my classes, visit office hours, or interact with my students in DDS 362 and 364.
• For prospective Postdoc researchers, I encourage applications to the Virginia Tech Presidential Postdoctoral Fellowship, and I would be happy to support strong candidates.