Yuanzhi Li awarded 2023 Sloan Research Fellowship

MBZUAI Affiliated Assistant Professor of Machine Learning Yuanzhi Li has been selected for a prestigious Sloan Research Fellowship in computer science by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The Fellowship is awarded in honor of extraordinary researchers whose creativity, innovation, and research accomplishments make them stand out as the next generation of leaders.

Yuanzhi Li

The fellowship recognizes creative, early-career researchers in seven scientific and technical fields: chemistry, computer science, Earth system science, economics, mathematics, neuroscience and physics. Li is one of only 22 scholars selected in computer science for 2023.

Sloan Research Fellowship candidates must be nominated by their fellow scientists, and winners are selected by independent panels of senior scholars on the basis of a candidate’s research accomplishments, creativity and potential to become a leader in their field. Winners each receive a two-year, $75,000 fellowship that can be used flexibly to advance their research.

About Yuanzhi Li

Li’s primary research area is deep learning theory, focusing on understanding the hierarchical feature learning process in neural networks and how it’s better than shallow learning methods; how the choice of optimization algorithms affects the training speed of different types of neural networks, and how it influences the generalization of the learned solution; and how to use pre-trained neural networks in downstream applications more effectively.

Prior to joining MBZUAI, Li was a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford and is an assistant professor in the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) Department of Machine Learning.