Yunzhu Li
Assistant Professor of Computer Science
Yunzhu Li is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University. Before joining Columbia, he was an Assistant Professor at UIUC CS and spent time as a Postdoc at Stanford, collaborating with Fei-Fei Li and Jiajun Wu.
Yunzhu earned his PhD from MIT under the guidance of Antonio Torralba and Russ Tedrake. His work has been recognized with the Best Paper Award at ICRA, the Best Systems Paper Award, and as a Finalist for the Best Paper Award at CoRL. He is also a recipient of the AAAI New Faculty Highlights, the Sony Faculty Innovation Award, the Amazon Research Award, the Adobe Research Fellowship, and the First Place Ernst A.
Guillemin Master’s Thesis Award in AI and Decision Making at MIT. His research has been published in top journals and conferences, including Nature and Science, and featured by major media outlets such as CNN, BBC, and The Wall Street Journal.
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Professional Experience
- Assistant Professor, Columbia University, 2024-present
- Assistant Professor, UIUC, 2023-2024
- Postdoctoral Scholar, Stanford University, 2022-2023
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Honors & Awards
- AAAI New Faculty Highlights, 2025
- Amazon Research Award, Fall 2024 Teachers Ranked as Excellent at UIUC, Spring 2024
- Best Conference Paper Award, International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2024
- Sony Faculty Innovation Award, 2023
- Best Systems Paper Award, Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) 2023
- Finalist, Best Paper/Best Student Paper Awards, Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) 2023
- First Place Recipient, Ernst A. Guillemin Master's Thesis Award in Artificial Intelligence and Decision Making at MIT, 2021
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Education
- PhD, EECS, MIT
- MS, EECS, MIT
- BS, CS, Peking University