UCLA Computer Science Assistant Professor Bolei Zhou has been honored with the prestigious Young Investigator Program (YIP) Award from the Office of Naval Research (ONR) in recognition of his groundbreaking work in computer vision and machine autonomy.

Selected from over 200 tenure-track or equivalent applicants nationwide, Zhou is one of 24 recipients in the 2025 award cohort. Established in 1985, the YIP supports early-career faculty who demonstrate exceptional promise and creativity in their research, providing recipients with up to $750,000 in funding over three years.

The ONR Machine Learning, Reasoning, and Intelligence program gave him the YIP for his research on data-driven simulation and vision-language models. This honor follows another significant achievement last year when Zhou received a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award to advance AI systems capable of interacting with the real world.

As principal investigator on three NSF-funded projects, Zhou is currently exploring AI applications in autonomous driving, urban accessibility, and smart transportation. In addition to his role in the Computer Science Department, he holds a faculty appointment in the Computational Medicine Department, which bridges UCLA Samueli and the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.

Learn more about the ONR Young Investigator Program here and the 2025 award cohort here.