NSF-MMLI is proud to announce that Prof. Heng Ji, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, has been honored as an ACL Fellow for 2025 by the Association for Computational Linguistics. This recognition celebrates her significant contributions to information extraction, multimodal and multilingual knowledge extraction, and AI for science.
A pioneer in the field, Prof. Ji leads the BLENDER Lab at UIUC, where researchers develop advanced techniques for extracting structured knowledge across languages, modalities, and scientific domains. More about her research and lab can be found on her website. In addition to her groundbreaking research, Prof. Ji serves as the Thrust Lead for Thrust 1 at the Molecule Maker Lab Institute (MMLI) where her team is developing foundational AI agents for discovery and synthesis of functional molecules.
Her election as an ACL Fellow highlights her status as a leading scholar whose work continues to shape the future of natural language processing and artificial intelligence.