Yizhou Yu is currently an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of California, Berkeley in 2000. His PhD thesis research is on modeling and editing real scenes with image-based techniques, and was under the direction of professor Jitendra Malik. He was a PhD student in the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, from 1994 to 1996. He also holds a M.S. degree in applied mathematics from State Key Laboratory of CAD & Graphics, and a B.S. from Department of Computer Science, at Zhejiang University, China.

He has done a considerable amount of research in computer graphics, vision, image processing, etc., including physically based fluid and granular material simulation, image-based modeling and rendering, texture analysis and synthesis, mesh and visibility processing, radiosity and global illumination, and has more than 50 publications in journals and conferences. He contributed to SIGGRAPH as papers' coauthor, course organizer, and electronic theatre contributor. He is a recipient of 2005 ACM SCA Best Paper Award, 2002 National Science Foundation CAREER Award, 1998 Microsoft Graduate Fellowship and 1992 Computerworld Scholarship. He was a visiting researcher at Microsoft Research Asia during summer 2001. His current research interests include biomedical image analysis and mining, data-driven graphical methods, computer animation and simulation, geometry processing and editing, and texture analysis and synthesis.