Bio

Hao Zhang is an Assistant Professor in Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute and the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at UC San Diego. Before joining UCSD, he was a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley working with Ion Stoica from 2021 to 2023. He completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University with Eric Xing from 2014 to 2020. During his PhD, he took a leave to work at the ML platform startup Petuum Inc from 2016 to 2021. His research lies at the intersection of machine learning and systems. His work includes FastVideo, DistServe, vLLM, Chatbot Arena, Vicuna, Alpa, Poseidon, and Petuum. His research has been recognized with a Sloan Research Fellowship (2026), a Google ML and Systems junior faculty award (2025), the Jay Lepreau Best Paper Award at OSDI'21, and an NVIDIA Pioneer Research Award at NeurIPS'17. He was nominated for MIT TR35 (China) in 2024. He joined Snowflake through acquihiring in 2023 and also co-founded the nonprofit LMSYS Org, which maintains many popular open models, evaluation platforms, and systems.