Biography
Yue M. Lu is the Gordon McKay Professor of Electrical Engineering and of Applied Mathematics at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and an affiliated faculty member in the Department of Statistics. Since 2024, he has also held the title of Harvard College Professor.
He received his formal training in theoretical electrical engineering, earning both the M.Sc. in Mathematics and the Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2007. He was a postdoctoral researcher at the Audiovisual Communications Laboratory at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) before joining the faculty at Harvard.
His research focuses on the mathematical foundations of AI, data science, and signal processing, with particular emphasis on the interplay of randomness and structure in high-dimensional systems. He develops probabilistic methods to understand the collective behavior of large systems of interacting components and to uncover the fundamental statistical limits governing their performance. His work aims to bring mathematical clarity to problems in modern machine learning and information processing and to deepen our conceptual understanding of these rapidly evolving fields.
His research has been recognized with several awards, including the Most Innovative Paper Award at the IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (2006), the Best Student Paper Award at IEEE ICIP (2007), and the Best Student Presentation Award at the 31st SIAM SEAS Conference (2007). His students’ papers have received several Best Student Paper awards at IEEE ICASSP (2011), IEEE GlobalSIP (2014), and IEEE CAMSAP (2017). He is a recipient of the 2015 ECE Illinois Young Alumni Achievement Award, and served as an IEEE Signal Processing Society Distinguished Lecturer (2022–2023).
He is an IEEE Fellow (Class of 2024) and an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory.
How to pronounce “Yue”? The vowel is not found in the English language. But you can get a very good approximation by starting with “Yu” and finishing with “eh”.