Dr. Yakun Sophia Shao is an Associate Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences department at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research interests are in the area of computer architecture, with a special focus on specialized accelerator, heterogeneous architecture, and agile VLSI design methodology. Previously, she was a Senior Research Scientist at NVIDIA Research and received her Ph.D. degree in 2016 from Harvard University.
Her work has been awarded Distinguished Artifact Awards at ISCA 2023 and 2024, the Best Paper Award at DAC 2021, the Best Paper Award at JSSC 2020, a Best Paper Award at MICRO 2019, Top Picks in Computer Architecture (2023, 2014), and Honorable Mentions (2019*2). Her Ph.D. dissertation was nominated by Harvard for ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award.
She is a recipient of the 2024 Anita Borg Early Career Award, a Sloan Research Fellowship, an NSF CAREER Award, the 2022 IEEE TCCA Young Computer Architect Award, a Google Faculty Rising Stars Award in Systems Research, a Google Research Scholar Award, a Facebook Research Award, an Okawa Foundation Research Grant, and the inaugural Dr. Sudhakar Yalamanchili Award.
