Director, VGL
Institute for Creative Technologies
Research Assistant Professor
USC Viterbi School of Engineering Computer Science Department
Prof. Yajie Zhao is a Research Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Southern California (USC) and the acting director of the Vision and Graphics Lab (VGL) at USC-ICT. She received her Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Xi’an Jiaotong University in 2011 and her Ph.D. degree in 2017 from the University of Kentucky. Yajie’s research interests lie in high-quality 3D content creation, including human digitization, performance capturing, and scene reconstruction/understanding. She currently leads the VGL in research efforts towards high-resolution human face/body 3D representation, neural rendering, and human/scene-related applications in VR/AR. Yajie serves as a reviewer and editor for CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, ICLR, SIGGRAPH; is the program chair of IEEE AIVR 2022 and 2024; and an Editorial Board member of the journal “Creating Lifelike Digital Humans.” Yajie’s research is currently supported by DARPA, ONR, IARPA, Sony, Nvidia, Meta, Apple, and Zoom.