Professor Tianlong Chen [Google Scholar] is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he directs the UNITES (University of North Carolina, AI Trustworthiness, Efficiency, and for Science) Lab. He received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from University of Texas at Austin in 2023, and completed his postdoctoral research at MIT CSAIL and Harvard Medical School in 2023-2024.

Dr. Chen's research focuses on building accurate, trustworthy, and efficient machine learning systems. His work spans fundamental algorithms for sparse neural networks, scalable optimization methods, and responsible AI systems. He has made significant contributions to the lottery ticket hypothesis, learning to optimize frameworks, and efficient deep learning methods. His research has been applied to various domains including healthcare, scientific computing, and large language models.

Dr. Chen has broad research interests in machine learning (ML), optimization, and AI for science. Currently, his research centers on developing efficient and trustworthy AI systems, with particular emphasis on sparse neural networks, efficient large language models, and AI for scientific applications. His work aims to make AI systems more accessible, reliable, and computationally efficient while maintaining high performance. Dr. Chen's research has been supported by NSF, NIH, Amazon Research Awards, Cisco Faculty Awards, UNC Accelerating AI Awards, and NAIRR Pilot Awards.

Dr. Chen has received numerous awards and honors, including the Amazon Research Award (Fall 2024, Spring 2025), Cisco Faculty Award, AAAI'25 New Faculty Highlights, NAIRR Pilot Award, UNC Accelerating AI Awards, CPAL Rising Star Award, KAUST Rising Stars Award, AdvML Rising Star Award, Low-Resource Methods for NLP SAC Award at NAACL 2025, Marco Ramoni Distinguished Paper Award at AMIA-IS 2025, Best Paper Award at LoG 2022, Best Paper Award at GenAI4Health at AAAI 2025, and Best Demo Paper Award at GenAI4Health at NeurIPS 2024. He has also received prestigious fellowships including the IBM Ph.D. Fellowship, Adobe Ph.D. Fellowship, and Graduate Dean's Prestigious Fellowship. Dr. Chen is actively recruiting talented students to join the UNITES Lab.