Yang (Katie) Zhao

Background & Expertise

Yang (Katie) Zhao is an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Her research interests lie at the intersection of Computer Architecture/System, Hardware Design and Machine Learning (ML), with a keen focus on hardware acceleration for emerging ML application and design automation tools. She received the Best Paper Award at the IEEE International Conference on LLM-Aided Design (ICLAD) 2025, the Best Paper Award at 57th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO) 2024, IEEE Micro’s Top Picks of 2023, 1st place demonstration at the 32nd ACM SIGDA University Demonstration at DAC 2022, ML and Systems Rising Stars 2023, and Ralph Budd Award for Best Thesis in the School of Engineering, Rice University, 2023. She spent 2023 as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology and received her PhD degree from Rice University in 2023.