Rising Professional Achievement Award
Di Wu M.S. ’15, Ph.D. ’17
Since earning his doctorate from UCLA Samueli, Di Wu has built a career turning advances in computing and artificial intelligence research into technologies used in fields ranging from genomics to generative AI.
Wu received his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Tsinghua University in China before coming to UCLA for graduate study. He joined the VAST Lab, led by Jason Cong, a distinguished professor of computer science and electrical and computer engineering and holder of the Volegenau Chair for Engineering Excellence. For his doctoral research, Wu helped prototype large-scale field-programmable gate array (FPGA) acceleration for big-data analytics, machine learning and genomics.
After UCLA, Wu became a staff engineer, and later, a founding engineer and software director at Falcon Computing Solutions, a VAST Lab spinoff. He helped produce FPGA-accelerated genomics pipelines supporting precision medicine and cancer research, including work supporting research conducted at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine.
He later co-founded and served as CEO of OmniML, which translated advanced model-compression research into technology for deploying AI on edge devices. The company designed tools to make AI models faster and more energy-efficient while simplifying deployment across different hardware platforms. Less than two years after its founding, OmniML was acquired in 2023 by Nvidia, where Wu now serves as director of Deep Learning Algorithm and Software.
Wu has also mentored aspiring entrepreneurs, sharing lessons from his experience building companies, scaling technologies, setting priorities and navigating the challenges of bringing new products to market.
