Vicky Yao is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Rice University. She completed her Ph.D. in Computer Science at Princeton and stayed on for a postdoctoral fellowship with the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics.
Her research focus is in computational biology, where she develops machine learning and statistical methods to improve our understanding of the biological circuitry that underlies living organisms and how its dysregulation may lead to disease. An important facet of her research is building intuitive, interactive systems as interfaces to the models and predictions that she develops, and she has tried to build such systems whenever appropriate.