Yiling Chen, a 2005 doctoral graduate of the College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) at Penn State, has been selected as the 2016 recipient of the Graduate School Alumni Society (GSAS) Early Career Award. The Early Career Award recognizes alumni who have demonstrated exceptional success in their chosen field within the first ten years after obtaining their graduate degree.
Currently serving as the Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University’s John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Chen joined the Harvard faculty in 2008 as an assistant professor of computer science. She was promoted to associate professor in 2012 and to full professor with tenure in 2015. Chen began her career as a postdoctoral research scientist at Yahoo! Research from 2006 until 2008.
Chen has risen rapidly through the ranks in her career due to a combination of her “wonderful ability to explain difficult problems and concepts with simple and easy-to-understand analogies,” and her capacity to pass on the most advanced scholarly and scientific knowledge and methods to her students, said Chao-Hsien Chu, professor of IST and management sciences at Penn State, and one of Chen’s nominators for the GSAS Early Career Award.
In addition to the GSAS award, Chen has garnered numerous other accolades for her achievements in research. Such honors include the National Science Foundation’s Early Career Development Award and being named to the 2011 “Artificial Intelligence 10 to Watch” list curated by IEEE Intelligent Systems.
Chen said her current research, “situated at the interface between computer science and economics, lies in the emerging area of social computing, where human creativity and resources are harnessed for the purpose of computational tasks.”
Chen and other recipients of this year’s GSAS awards were honored during the Graduate School Alumni Society’s recognition dinner on March 19, at the Atherton Hotel in State College, Pennsylvania.