Junyan Zhu

Michael B. Donohue Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Robotics @ Carnegie Mellon University

About

Jun-Yan Zhu is the Michael B. Donahue Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Robotics at CMU’s School of Computer Science. Before joining CMU, he was a Research Scientist at Adobe Research and a postdoctoral researcher at MIT CSAIL. He obtained his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley and his B.E. from Tsinghua University. He studies computer vision, computer graphics, and computational photography. His current research focuses on collaboration between human creators and generative models. He has received the Sloan Research Fellowships, the Samsung AI Researcher of the Year, Packard Fellowships for Science and Engineering, the NSF CAREER Award, the ACM SIGGRAPH Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award, the UC Berkeley EECS David J. Sakrison Memorial Prize for outstanding doctoral research, and several industry faculty awards (JPMC, Amazon, Sony, Cisco, NVIDIA). His co-authored work has received the ICCV 2025 Best Paper Award (The Marr Prize), 2025 Frontier of Science Award, ICRA 2024 Best Paper Award on Human-Robot Interaction, two CVPR Best Paper Finalists (2019, 2022), NVIDIA Pioneer Research Award, SIGGRAPH 2019 Real-time Live Best of Show Award and Audience Choice Award, and The 100 Greatest Innovations of 2019 by Popular Science. His work and commentary have been covered in the New Yorker, the New York Times, BBC, CNN, Reuters, and The Economist. For more details, please visit the website: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~junyanz/

Country

United States

City

Pittsburgh

Industry

Research

Skill

Computer Vision, Computer Graphics, Machine Learning

Experience

Michael B. Donohue Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Robotics

Carnegie Mellon University

2020-9 - Present · 6 yrs 1 mo

Pittsburgh, PA

2026 Sloan Research Fellowships 2025 ICCV 2025 Best Paper Award (the Marr Prize) 2025 Frontiers of Science Award 2024 Samsung AI Researcher of the Year 2024 ICRA Best Paper on Human-Robot Interaction 2024 ICRA EXPO 2024 Best Demo Award Finalist 2023 Packard Fellowships for Science and Engineering 2023 NSF CAREER Award 2022 Amazon Faculty Research Award 2022 JPMorgan Chase Faculty Research Award 2022 CVPR 2022 Best Paper Finalist 2019-2022 Sony Faculty Research Award

Research Scientist

Adobe

2019-8 - 2020-9 · 1 yr 2 mos

Greater Boston Area

Contributed to Adobe Neural Filter and Landscape Mixer.

Postdoctoral Researcher

MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL)

2018-1 - 2019-8 · 1 yr 8 mos

The 100 Greatest Innovations of 2019 by Popular Science (2019) ACM SIGGRAPH Real-time Live Best in Show Award (2019) ACM SIGGRAPH Real-time Live Audience Choice Award (2019) CVPR Best Paper Finalist (2019) NVIDIA Pioneer Research Award (2018)

Ph.D. student

University of California, Berkeley

2013-9 - 2017-12 · 4 yrs 4 mos

ACM SIGGRAPH Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award (2018) UC Berkeley EECS David J. Sakrison Memorial Prize for Outstanding Doctoral Research (2018) Facebook Graduate Fellowship (2015)

Research Intern

Adobe

2013-6 - 2013-8 · 3 mos

Greater Seattle Area

Graduate Research Assistant

Computer Science Department, Carnegie Mellon University

2012-9 - 2013-5 · 9 mos

Greater Pittsburgh Area

Research Assistant

High Performance Computing Group, Tsinghua University

2012-3 - 2012-6 · 4 mos

Beijing, China

Research Assistant

Graphics and Geometric Computing Group, Tsinghua University

2010-7 - 2012-3 · 1 yr 9 mos

Presented the novel video editing method.

Visiting Student

Microsoft

2011-3 - 2012-2 · 1 yr

Beijing, China

Vice-Director

Initiating Mutual Understanding through Student Exchange (IMUSE)

2009-9 - 2010-8 · 1 yr

Education

University of California, Berkeley

Computer Science

2013 - 2017 · 4 yrs

ACM SIGGRAPH Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award (2018) UC Berkeley EECS David J. Sakrison Memorial Prize for outstanding doctoral research (2018) Facebook Graduate Fellowship (2015)

Carnegie Mellon University

Computer Science

2012 - 2013 · 1 yr

Tsinghua University

Computer Science and Technology

2008 - 2012 · 4 yrs

Outstanding Undergraduate Thesis at Tsinghua University, 2012. Excellent Undergraduate Student at Tsinghua University, 2012. National Scholarship, by the Ministry of Education of China, 2009 and 2010. Singapore Technologies and Engineering Scholarship, 2010, 2011 and 2012.