Yong-Yeol (YY) Ahn is a Quantitative Foundation Distinguished Professor at the University of Virginia School of Data Science. He was previously a professor at the Indiana University School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering (2011–2025) and a visiting professor at MIT (2020–2021). He worked as a postdoctoral research associate at the Center for Complex Network Research at Northeastern University and as a visiting researcher at the Center for Cancer Systems Biology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute after earning his Ph.D. in Statistical Physics from KAIST in 2008.
His research focuses on data science, spanning methodological work in network science, machine learning, and AI, as well as their applications to computational social science, computational neuroscience and biology, and the science of science. He is a recipient of several awards, including Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship and LinkedIn Economic Graph Challenge.
