Qing Qu receives U-M Chinese Heritage & Scholarship Junior Faculty Award

Qing Qu, assistant professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), received the inaugural U-M Chinese Heritage & Scholarship Junior Faculty Award in the engineering and applied sciences category. The award “celebrates emerging scholars at the University of Michigan who demonstrate excellence in teaching, research, and service.” 

“I am honored to receive the Junior Faculty Award and deeply grateful to my students, colleagues, and family for their support. This recognition inspires me to continue striving for excellence in research, teaching, and service to the department and university,” said Qu,

Qu’s research develops explainable and efficient generative AI models by uncovering low-dimensional structures in data and models. A key contribution is identifying neural collapse, where deep representations evolve towards minimal within-class variability and maximally separated class means, offering a geometric perspective on transfer learning and generalization. In generative modeling, Qu’s work on diffusion models reveals consistent model reproducibility—the ability to generate near-identical outputs from the same noise inputs, independent of architecture or training. This insight enhances understanding of generalization, enabling more controllable, interpretable, and reliable AI systems.

Qu has regularly collaborated with other ECE faculty, including Associate Professor Laura Balzano, Jeff Fessler, and Liyue Shen to maximize the real-world applications of his theoretical contributions to the field. For example, his work with PC Ku resulted in a wafer-thin chip-scale spectrometer applied as a skin patch to measure sweat in athletes and potentially perform health monitoring and diagnosis.

“Qing’s funding record and research activities are already at or above the level of many tenured faculty,” said Fessler, Interim Chair of ECE and William L. Root Distinguished University Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Qu’s early-career research contributions have been previously recognized with an NSF CAREER Award (2022), the Amazon AWS AI Award, the NeurIPS’23 Diffusion Model Workshop Best Paper, and the MMLS’24 Best Poster Award. Qu has secured several NSF and DoD awards to support his research and mentored 10 PhD students and 4 postdocs. Qu’s group regularly publishes in top ML conferences such as ICLR, ICML, and NeurIPS, including several oral and spotlight presentations.

Qu has also made substantial contributions to the ECE curriculum, especially in leading the effort to create the Principles of Machine Learning (EECS 453) course for ECE undergraduates, along with Balzano and Lei Ying. In summer 2024, Qu launched the AI Magic Summer Camp for K-12 students, with over half from underrepresented backgrounds. He also disseminated his research through several tutorials and short courses at major conferences (ICASSP, CVPR, CPAL, ACDL), attracting hundreds of attendees.

The U-M Chinese Heritage & Scholarship Junior Faculty Award was presented to Qu by the University of Michigan Association of Chinese Professors at their annual award celebration dinner on February 23, 2025.