Zhijing Jin Selected Young Researcher for the Heidelberg Laureate Forum 2025
Tübingen – Zhijing Jin, who is an incoming Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto starting in Fall 2025, and currently a postdoc in the Empirical Inference Department at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tübingen, has been selected to attend the prestigious Heidelberg Laureate Forum 2025. The invitation comes a year after Zhijing attended the 73rd Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting in June 2024.
The event brings together some of the brightest minds in mathematics and computer science for a week of engaging interdisciplinary exchange: laureates of the Abel Prize, Fields Medal, Turing Award, ACM Prize in Computing, and many other prestigious awards. During the conference in September, 200 selected young researchers and other participants will have the opportunity to connect with scientific pioneers and draw from the rich body of experience brought by the attending laureates. While lectures and panel discussions form the foundation of the scientific program, interactive program elements such as Workshops and Master Classes will provide a variety of avenues for attendees to interact and share ideas with one another. This compelling networking event combines scientific, social and outreach activities in a unique atmosphere, sustained by comprehensive exchange and scientific inspiration.
Zhijing Jin has prominent work on artificial intelligence and large language models (LLMs), natural language processing (NLP), and causal inference. Her two main lines of research are causal reasoning with LLMs and multi-agent LLM systems, with applications on AI for Science and AI Safety. Having authored over 60 papers, many of which appear at top AI conferences (e.g., ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, NeurIPS, ICLR, AAAI), she has received three Rising Star awards, two Best Paper Awards at NeurIPS 2024 Workshops, as well as several fellowships at Open Philanthropy and the Future of Life Institute. Her work is reported in CHIP Magazine, WIRED, and MIT News, and she received wide recognition by the NLP community, taking senior service roles such as Senior Area Chairs, and Member of the ACL Ethics Committee.
Zhijing obtained her Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Hong Kong with First Class Honors, and then started her Ph.D. directly with the Max Planck Institute for Intelligence Systems with a special exemption to skip the Master’s degree due to her excellence in research. “I am really grateful to have received lots of help and mentorship support in my academic journey,” says Zhijing. “HLF will further have a profound impact on me, and inspire me to be a better computer scientist. I also look forward to passing on the knowledge and inspirations gained from the Forum to more people through mentoring and sharing.” Zhijing is very active in helping diversity and mentorship, as she co-leads the ACL Year-Round Mentorship Program from 2021, a global network providing mentorship suggestions to hundreds of students all over the world interested in NLP research.