The Intel Rising Star Faculty Award (RSA) program annually recognizes early-career academic researchers who are at the forefront of technological research with the potential to reshape industries. The program provides both a monetary award and hopes to facilitate long-term collaborative relationships with senior technical leaders at Intel. Award recipients are also chosen for their innovative teaching methods and for their efforts to improve the fields of computer science and engineering.

Hao joined the ECE the faculty in 2022 and she currently holds the Sutterfield Family Early Career Professorship. She received her Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Waseda University, Japan, in 2017, and was a postdoc in UIUC from 2018 to 2021.

She supervises six Ph.D. students in the Software/Hardware Co-design (Sharc) Lab, exploring the joint area of efficient hardware design, machine learning algorithms, and agile design automation tools. The group's work involves high-performance graph neural network (GNN) accelerator design and automation, which are highly recognized and broadly used by high energy physicists, winning the 2023 International Conference on Field-Programmable Logic and Applications (FPL) community award for impactful open-source contributions. Her group also focuses on building open-source design automation tools, especially high-level synthesis, significantly expediting hardware and architecture development; one of their works was awarded IEEE International Symposium on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines (FCCM) best paper runner-up.

ECE’s Asif Khan was recognized with an Intel Rising Star Award in 2020.