Minlan Yu joins the Yale Computer Science Faculty

July 27, 2016

Minlan Yu joined the Yale Computer Science Department as an Assistant Professor on July 1, 2016.

Dr. Yu’s research focuses on designing networked systems that make data centers inherently easier to manage. Data centers are increasingly crucial to the hosting of many online services on the Internet. Today, however, managing a data-center network with hundreds of thousands of hosts and switches requires juggling myriad management tasks – including topology design, traffic management, attack prevention, and performance diagnosis – all while minimizing cost. To meet these management needs, Dr. Yu designs creative algorithms and data structures that are amenable both to high-speed implementation (in hardware switches and on end hosts) and to provable performance guarantees. She has introduced programmable abstractions that allow network operators to specify a wide variety of management goals.  She has also built runtime systems that support these goals by identifying the best division of labor among switches, hosts, and the centralized controller. Her designs are being adopted for next-generation chipsets and are deployed in production data centers.

Prior to joining Yale University, Dr. Yu was an Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California. She obtained her PhD in 2011 from Princeton University under the supervision of Professor Jennifer Rexford.