SIGKDD Awards

The 2025 SIGKDD Rising Star Award is presented to Dr. Carl Yang. Yang is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Emory University, jointly appointed in the Rollins School of Public Health and Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 2020, and B.Eng. in Computer Science and Engineering at Zhejiang University in 2014. His research interests span data mining, deep learning, multimodality foundation models and trustworthy AI, with applications in graph analytics, neuroscience, biomedicine and healthcare. Carl's research results have led to 200+ peer-reviewed publications in top venues across AI/ML and medicine/healthcare. He serves as the Organizer of KDD Health Day and the Chair-Elect of AMIA KDDM Working Group. He is also a 1% NIH/CDC Grant Awardee in 2025, and a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award in 2025, NIH K25 (Career) Award in 2023, and multiple Best Paper Awards such as of MedInfo 2025, KDD Health Day 2022, ML4H 2022, and ICDM 2020.