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BS (NTU); PhD in Physics (Harvard); PhD in CS (Illinois); Member, NAS; Member AAAS; Member CAS; Member, Academia Sinica; Founding Member, The Hong Kong Academy of Sciences
BS (NTU); PhD in Physics (Harvard); PhD in CS (Illinois); Member, NAS; Member AAAS; Member CAS; Member, Academia Sinica; Founding Member, The Hong Kong Academy of Sciences
Dean of the Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences, Tsinghua University;
Distinguished Professor-at-Large, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Prof Andrew Chi-Chih Yao was born in Shanghai, China and grew up in Taiwan. He received a Bachelor of Science in Physics in 1967 from National Taiwan University, a doctorate degree in Physics from Harvard University in 1972, and another one in Computer Science from the University of Illinois in 1975. From 1975 onward, Prof Yao served on the faculty at MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley and, during 1986 – 2004, at Princeton University as William and Edna Macaleer Professor of Engineering and Applied Science. In 2004, he left Princeton to join Tsinghua University in Beijing. He is currently the Dean of IIIS (Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences) at Tsinghua. He is also a Distinguished Professor-at-Large at The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
At Tsinghua University, Prof Yao founded IIIS and built it into a world-renowned interdisciplinary research center, including a cutting-edge quantum computing laboratory. The elite undergraduate program started by Prof Yao in 2005 (fondly nicknamed the “Yao Class” by students) has produced outstanding graduates in computer science, eagerly sought after by first-rate graduate schools everywhere.
Prof Yao’s research interests are in the theory of computation and its applications, including cryptography, communication, algorithmic economics and quantum computing. He is recipient of the prestigious A.M. Turing Award in year 2000 for his groundbreaking contributions to the theory of computation. He has also received numerous other honors and awards, including the George Polya Prize (1987), the Donald E. Knuth Prize (1996), and honorary degrees from City University of Hong Kong (2003), The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (2004), The Chinese University of Hong Kong (2006), the University of Waterloo (2009), the University of Macau (2012), and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (2014). He is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, The Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Academia Sinica.
Website of Prof Andrew Yao at Tsinghua University
December 2021