Yifan Hu received a BSc/MSc in Applied Mathematics from Shanghai Jiao-Tong University in 1985/1988. After a brief period of teaching at Shanghai Jiao-Tong, he went on to receive a Ph.D. in Optimization from Loughborough University in 1992. He worked as a senior scientific officer in Daresbury Laboratory between 1992 to 2001, with a short period working for Computational Dynamics in between. He joined Wolfram Research in 2001, and AT&T Labs in 2007. In 2014, he joined Yahoo Labs. His research interests include network/information visualization, data mining/machine learning, numerical and combinatorical algorithms and scientific computing.