The CS Department is pleased to announce that Professor Yizhou Sun is the recipient of a 2019 Okawa Research Grant. The Okawa Foundation awards these grants for studies and analyzes in the fields of information and telecommunication. This year the six recipients were from UC Berkeley, Stanford, UC Los Angeles, University of Southern California, Caltech, and Carnegie Mellon.

Professor Sun’s recent research focuses on Neural Operators for Mining, Searching, and Reasoning on Graphs, i.e., abstract and design the basic graph operators that are key to many graph functions. Her research explores data from different domains, such as online social networks and biomedical networks.

In addition to her recent Okawa Research Grant, she has received numerous awards that include the 2018 Amazon Research Award, 2016 UIUC Distinguished Alumni Educator Award, 2015 NSF CAREER Award, 2013 ACM SIGKDD Dissertation Award, 2013 Yahoo! Academic Career Enhancement Award, 2013 Yahoo! DAIS Outstanding Research Award, and others.

The mission of the Okawa Foundation is promotion and development in the field of Information and Communications Technology through awards and research grants as well as efforts to nurture researchers, engineers, and providers. It also seeks to promote diversity and ubiquitousness of human communication and thereby contribute to the peace and prosperity of humankind.