By Kimberly Mann Bruch — 

Hao Zhang of the University of California San Diego has received an inaugural 2025 Google ML and Systems Junior Faculty Award in recognition of the significance and promise of his work in machine learning, systems, and LLMs. Zhang is an assistant professor at the School of Computing, Information and Data Sciences’ Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute (HDSI) and an affiliate with the Jacobs School of Engineering Department of Computer Science and Engineering. He leads the Hao AI Lab at UC San Diego, and his team has created research and widely-adopted open source system artifacts supporting  serving and evaluating today’s strong AI models like ChatGPT.

“I am honored to receive this award from Google, which includes a gift of $100,000 that I will use to further my efforts in creating strong, efficient and secure machine learning models that support real-world problems,” Zhang said. “Thank you to the engineers and scientists at Google for granting me this award and I look forward to sharing the results of my work in the near future.”

Google created the nomination-based award to recognize the significance and promise of the work being undertaken by young faculty members. A group of Google engineers and researchers selected more than 50 professors from 27 U.S. universities who are leading the analysis, design and implementation of efficient, scalable, secure and trustworthy computing systems. Their work crosses the technology stack— from algorithms to software and hardware, enabling machine learning and cloud computing at an increasingly massive scale.