Dr. Yutong Zhao

Dr. Yutong Zhao joined California State University, Long Beach as an Assistant Professor in Fall 2025. Prior to this, he was an Assistant Professor at the University of Central Missouri from August 2023 to June 2025. He earned his Ph.D. in Software Engineering and M.Sc. in Computer Science from Stevens Institute of Technology in 2023 and 2019, respectively, and received a B.E. degree from South China University of Technology in 2015.

Dr. Zhao’s research interests span Software Engineering, Performance Analysis, Machine and Deep Learning, and Natural Language Processing. He has published in top-tier journals such as IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering and presented at prestigious conferences including ICSE, ASE, ESEC/FSE, and ISSTA. In 2025, he received NSF’s CRII award for the project titled “CRII: SHF: RUI: A Unified LLM-Empowered Framework for Systematic Software Performance Issue Testing, Localization, and Optimization”. He also has a strong track record in mentoring both graduate and undergraduate students in software engineering and data science areas.