Yulan He is a Professor in Natural Language Processing at the Department of Informatics. Her research centres on the integration of machine learning and natural language processing for text understanding. More recently, she focuses on improving the robustness of Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning, agentic AI, long-context QA, model interpretability, safety alignment, AI for education, health, and science.

She has received several prizes and awards for her research. Her five-year Turing AI Fellowship project, “Event-Centric Framework for Natural Language Understanding”, funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), was awarded Best Research Project (Research Excellence) at the UK AI & Robotics Awards 2026. She also received a Best Research Paper Award at the same awards ceremony, as well as a SWSA Ten-Year Award, and a CIKM Test-of-Time Award, and was named an inaugural Highly Ranked Scholar by ScholarGPS.

Yulan obtained her PhD degree in spoken language understanding from the University of Cambridge, and her MEng and BASc (First Class Honours) degrees in Computer Engineering from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

Research interests

• LLM reasoning
• Agentic AI
• Model interpretability
• Machine learning for NLP
• Safety and alignment in LLMs
• AI for education, health, and science

Further information

• Personal website
• Google Scholar
• DBLP