People

Faculty

Huan Sun

Huan is an endowed College of Engineering Innovation Scholar and associate professor with tenure in the CSE Department and at The Ohio State University. She was a visiting scientist at the University of Washington and received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of California, Santa Barbara and a B.S. in EEIS from the University of Science and Technology of China. Her research interests lie in natural language processing and AI, with emphasis on assessing and advancing the capabilities and safety of large language model (LLM)-based autonomous agents. Her research received Best Paper Finalist at CVPR, Honorable Mention for Best Paper Awards at ACL (two papers), 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 more info, please check her CV.

Selected work I am most excited about recently with links to our Twitter/X discussions (@hhsun1):

Graduate Student

Ron Chen
Ph.D. Student
Jaylen Jones
Ph.D. Student
Botao Yu
Ph.D. Student
Yifei Li
Ph.D. Student
Tianci Xue
Ph.D. Student

Yuting Ning
Ph.D. Student
Tianshu Zhang
Ph.D. Student
Boshi Wang
Ph.D. Student
Zeyi Liao
Ph.D. Student
Hanane Moussa
Ph.D. Student
I also closely work with the following students:

Ash Lewis
Ph.D. Student (Advisor: Prof. Mike White)
Alyssa Allen
Ph.D. Student (Advisor: Prof. Mike White)
Shijie Chen
Ph.D. Student (Advisor: Prof. Yu Su)
Bernal Jimenez
Ph.D. Student (Advisor: Prof. Yu Su)

Undergraduate Student

Zhuoyang Li
Exp. graduation: 2026
Aadit Shah
Exp. graduation: 2025


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.:

  • Lingbo Mo (Ph.D., Graduated: 2024, First employment: Amazon AWS AI Lab)
  • Xiang Yue (Ph.D., Graduated: 2023, First employment: Postdoc hosted by CMU)
  • Xiang Deng (Ph.D., Graduated: 2023, First employment: Google)
  • Zhen Wang (Ph.D., Graduated: 2022, First employment: Postdoc hosted by UCSD)
  • 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:

Undergraduate:

  • Yufei Wang (Undergraduate, Graduated: 2025, Next: Master’s student at Carnegie Mellon University)
  • Vishal Kumar (Undergraduate, Graduated: 2025, Next: Master’s student at Stanford University)
  • Huanli Gong (Undergraduate, Graduated: 2023, Next: Master’s student at Duke University)
  • Nikolas McNeal (Undergraduate, Graduated: 2023, Next: Ph.D. student at Georgia Tech)
  • 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

I am dedicated to training the next generation of talents and am very proud of their work and achievements:

  • 2025 marks the fifth year in a row for my students to win Outstanding Graduate Research Award by CSE: Ziyu Yao (2021), Zhen Wang (2022), Xiang Yue (2023), Lingbo Mo (2024), Boshi Wang (2025)
  • Best Paper Finalist at CVPR’24: Xiang Yue
  • Honorable Mentions for Best Paper Awards at ACL 2023: Xiang Yue (for synthetic text generation), Boshi Wang (for understanding chain-of-thought)
  • 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
  • Undergraduate Research Award by CSE: Frederick Zhang (2021), Ron Chen (2022), Nikolas McNeal (2023)