On February 17 (local time), the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation announced the recipients of the 2026 Sloan Research Fellowships. A total of 126 scientists from 44 research institutions across seven scientific fields were selected, including 22 scholars of Chinese descent. Among the awardees are Shanghai Jiao Tong University alumni Hao Zhang and Haihao Lu.

Alumni Profiles

Hao Zhang

Alumnus of the School of Computer Science at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, M.S. in Computer Science and Technology, Class of 2014\ Assistant Professor, University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego)

His research focuses on the intersection of machine learning and computer systems (MLSys). He has long been dedicated to addressing a central challenge: how to make large models run faster, more efficiently, more reliably, and at greater scale in real-world environments. His work spans inference acceleration, service system architecture, distributed execution, as well as system optimization and engineering implementation for multimodal and video generation. Hao Zhang is widely regarded as one of the key figures in “bringing large language models into real-world deployment.” He has led/contributed to several widely adopted systems and tools, including vLLM, DistServe, Chatbot Arena, Vicuna, FastChat, Alpa, Poseidon, and FastVideo. His research and engineering contributions are often described by the community as one of the key foundations supporting system optimization and acceleration in the era of large models. He has received major awards such as the OSDI 2021 Jay Lepreau Best Paper Award and the NeurIPS 2017 NVIDIA Pioneer Research Award, as well as the Google Machine Learning & Systems Junior Faculty Award (2025). His Google Scholar citations currently exceed 27,000.

Haihao Lu

Alumnus of Zhiyuan College at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, B.S. in Mathematics and Applied Mathematics, Class of 2014\ Assistant Professor, MIT Sloan School of Management

His research focuses on the intersection of optimization, computation, and data science, aiming to overcome key bottlenecks in algorithm design and high-performance computing for large-scale optimization. He has published multiple papers in leading journals in the field of optimization, including Mathematical Programming and the SIAM Journal on Optimization. Many of his research outcomes originate from real-world challenges faced by leading technology companies and optimization software firms, promoting the practical application of theoretical methods in complex scenarios. The PDLP algorithm he proposed with collaborators significantly improves the efficiency and scalability of solving large-scale linear programming problems and has been widely adopted in industry. Before joining the MIT Sloan School of Management, he served as an Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and worked as a researcher in Google’s large-scale optimization team.

About the Award

Established in 1955, the Sloan Research Fellowship is awarded annually by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to recognize outstanding early-career researchers in the United States and Canada who demonstrate creativity, innovation, and significant research achievements. Each fellowship provides a two-year research grant of $75,000, which recipients may use flexibly to support their research activities. The Sloan Research Fellowship has long been regarded as a “predictor of future Nobel laureates.” As of February 2026, 59 Sloan Fellows have later received the Nobel Prize, 17 have won the Fields Medal (the highest honor in mathematics), 72 have been awarded the U.S. National Medal of Science, and 25 have received the John Bates Clark Medal in economics.

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Alumni Hao Zhang and Haihao Lu Awarded the Sloan Research Fellowship

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