Faculty
Huan Sun
Huan is an associate professor (with tenure) in the CSE Department at the Ohio State University. She was a visiting scientist at the University of Washington (2016) and received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of California, Santa Barbara (2015) and a B.S. in EEIS from the University of Science and Technology of China (2010). Her research interests lie in natural language processing, data mining and AI, with emphasis on natural language interfaces (NLIs) to texts, tables, knowledge graphs, relational databases and computer programs (i.e., question answering, semantic parsing, program synthesis) and making such NLIs interactive and conversational to help users complete tasks through dialogue. Her research received the ACM SIGMOD Research Highlight Award and the Best Paper Award from the IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine (BIBM). She is a recipient of NSF CAREER Award, Google Research Scholar and Google Faculty Award, OSU Lumley Research Award, OSU President’s Research Excellence Award, and SIGKDD Ph.D. Dissertation Runner-Up Award, among others. Her team TacoBot won third place in the first Alexa Prize TaskBot challenge in 2022 and was the only award-winning team in the US. Their TacoBot is currently deployed in Alexa.
For prospective students: Please reach out if you are interested in joining us! OSU is ranked 24th in Artificial Intelligence and 19th in Systems by US News in 2022! Note that no ranking is perfect and please consider multiple dimensions when choosing a program.
Graduate Student
Undergraduate Student

Exp. graduation: 2023

Exp. graduation: 2023
Visiting Student
- Bernhard Kratzwald (Oct 2019 – Feb 2020, from ETH)
- Shuyi Song (Sep 2019 – Aug 2020, from Zhenjiang University)
- Sicong Ouyang (Sep 2019 – Dec 2019, from BUPT & Tsinghua)
- Boyuan Pan (Nov 2018 – May 2019, with financial support provided, from Zhejiang University)
- Yuantong Li (Sep 2018 – Jan 2019, with financial support provided, now at Cornell)
Alumni
Ph.D.:
- Zhen Wang (Ph.D., Graduated: 2022, First employment: Postdoc jointly hosted by UCSD/MBZUAI/CMU)
- Ziyu Yao (Ph.D., Graduated: 2021, First employment: Assistant Professor at George Mason University)
- Jie Zhao (Ph.D., Graduated: 2020, First employment: Applied Scientist at Amazon)
Master:
- Leslie Zhou (Master, Graduated: 2022)
- Varun Ranganathan Dhanvanth (Master, Graduated: 2020, joined Facebook)
- Kaushik Mani (Master, Graduated: 2020, joined Oracle)
- Jayavardhan Reddy Peddamail (Master, Graduated: 2019, joined Google working in NLP and Machine Learning)
- Dushyanta Dhyani (Master, Graduated: 2018, joined Amazon AlexaBrain group)
Undergraduate:
- Emmett Jesrani (Undergraduate, Graduated: 2022, Next: Bloomberg)
- Bryan Kohler (Undergraduate, Graduated: 2022)
- Xinliang “Frederick” Zhang (Undergraduate, Graduated: 2021, Next: Ph.D. student at UMichigan EECS)
- Heming Sun (Undergraduate, Graduated: 2021, Next: Master student at Univ. Southern California, CS)
- Courtney Campbell (Undergraduate, Graduated: 2020)
- Brian Gainer (Undergraduate, Graduated: 2020, joined Snapchat)
- George Li (Undergraduate, Graduated: 2020, joined Akuna Capital)
- Frank W. Meszaros (Undergraduate, Graduated: 2019, joined Vectrix.io)
Awards to Students and Alumni
- Presidential Fellowship: Ziyu Yao and Xiang Deng (“The Presidential Fellowship is the most prestigious award given by the Graduate School. Recipients of this award embody the highest standards of scholarship in the full range of Ohio State’s graduate programs.”)
- College of Engineering Graduate Award for Exemplary Graduate Student Researcher: Xiang Yue (only one in College of Engineering)
- Rising Star in EECS: Ziyu Yao
- Rising Star in Data Science (UChicago, 2020): Zhen Wang
- Graduate Research Award by CSE: Ziyu Yao, Zhen Wang, Xiang Yue
- Undergraduate Research Award by CSE: Frederick Zhang, Ron Chen, Nikolas McNeal
Group Photos
Most photos were taken together with Prof. Yu Su‘s group.
Sorry if we missed photos with you. Please don’t hesitate to share them with Huan.