Rate My Professor Hongfeng Yu

Hongfeng Yu is a Professor in the School of Computing and Director of the Holland Computing Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He holds a B.S. degree and an M.S. degree in computer science from Zhejiang University in China, and a Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of California, Davis. After completing his doctorate, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Sandia National Laboratories. Yu joined the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2012, advancing from assistant professor to associate professor with tenure, and subsequently to full professor. He served as interim director of the Holland Computing Center starting in 2019 and was appointed permanent director on August 15, 2022, following a national search. His research specializes in large data analysis and visualization, high-performance computing, and user interfaces and interaction. Key areas include scalable visualization and visual analytics for large and complex data, AI and data-driven methods for scientific discovery in physical sciences, geosciences, biomedical systems, agriculture, and biology, as well as scalable algorithms, systems, and cyberinfrastructure for high-performance computing platforms.

In 2017, Yu received the National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Program CAREER award, a five-year grant of $476,952, to advance network visualization capabilities for exploring large-scale graphs in applications such as gene regulation networks and social networks. His publications appear in premier venues and have significant impact, including "Application of machine learning in groundwater quality modeling-A comprehensive review" (Water Research, 2023, cited by 313), "Combining in-situ and in-transit processing to enable extreme-scale scientific analysis" (SC'12: Proceedings of the International Conference on High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, 2012, cited by 295), "In situ visualization for large-scale combustion simulations" (IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 2010, cited by 270), "Make the Fastest Faster: Importance Mask Synthesis for Interactive Volume Visualization Using Reconstruction Neural Networks" (IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 2026), and "MEPDB: Database of microExons in plants" (New Phytologist, 2025). Yu holds extensive leadership roles in the field, such as Area Full Papers Co-Chair for IEEE VIS 2026, Steering Committee Chair for IEEE LDAV 2024, and program committee service for IEEE VIS, PacificVis, EuroVis, and others. Institutionally, he chairs the School of Computing Faculty Search Committee and serves on UNL committees including the Comprehensive Research Data Strategy Task Force.