Yunzhu Li

Assistant Professor, Columbia University

Distinguished Scholar Network Member

Yunzhu Li is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University. Previously, he was an Assistant Professor at UIUC, a Postdoc at Stanford, and earned his PhD from MIT. His research spans robotics, computer vision, and machine learning, with a focus on enabling robots to perceive and interact with the physical world through structured world models, multimodal sensing, and foundation models. His work has been recognized with the Best Paper Award at ICRA, Best Systems Paper Award at CoRL, AAAI New Faculty Highlights, and industry honors from Sony, Amazon, and Adobe. His research has appeared in Nature, Science, and top AI/robotics venues, and has been featured by CNN, BBC, and The Wall Street Journal. Yunzhu is also deeply engaged in entrepreneurship, passionate about translating research breakthroughs into scalable real-world impact through robotics startups.