Dr. Yufei Zhao

Associate Professor

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Biography

Yufei Zhao joined the mathematics faculty as an Assistant Professor in July 2017. He earned dual SB degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2010, a MASt in Mathematics from Cambridge in 2011, and a PhD from MIT in 2015 under the supervision of Jacob Fox. Before returning to MIT, Yufei was an Esmée Fairbairn Junior Research Fellow in Mathematics at New College, Oxford, and a Research Fellow at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at UC Berkeley. Zhao's main research area is combinatorics, particularly focusing on extremal, probabilistic, and additive problems in combinatorics and their connections to theoretical computer science. He is developing tools to connect graph theory with additive combinatorics. Zhao has received several prestigious awards, including the SIAM Dénes Kőnig prize in 2018, the MIT Future Science Award from the School of Science in 2018, the Class of 1956 Career Development Professorship from 2018 to 2021, the Sloan Research Fellowship in 2019, the NSF CAREER Award in 2021, and the Edmund F. Kelly Research Award in 2021. He runs the Putnam Seminar and oversees MIT's participation in the Putnam Competition, for which he received the First-Year Seminar Award in 2019 from the MIT Office of the Vice Chancellor. Zhao was previously an undergraduate at MIT and is a three-time Putnam Fellow. In 2020, he received the Outstanding UROP Mentor Award from MIT's Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program.

Research Interests

Awards

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SIAM Dénes Kőnig Prize

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MIT Future Science Award

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Class of 1956 Career Development Professorship

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Sloan Research Fellowship

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NSF CAREER Award

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Edmund F. Kelly Research Award

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First-Year Seminar Award

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Outstanding UROP Mentor Award