Yakun Sophia Shao

I am an Associate Professor at the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences department of University of California, Berkeley. My research interests are in the area of computer architecture, with a special focus on specialized accelerator, heterogeneous architecture, and agile VLSI design methodology. Previously, I was a Senior Research Scientist at NVIDIA Research and received my Ph.D. degree in 2016 from Harvard University.

My 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). My Ph.D. dissertation was nominated by Harvard for ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award. I am 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.

I am looking for motivated Ph.D. and M.S. students, postdoctoral scholars, and undergraduate researchers. If you are interested, please email me with a copy of your CV to start a conversation. If you are an undergraduate student at Berkeley interested in doing research, please fill out this interest form.