Empower Your Pitch Competition
Selected as a finalist among all JHU PhD competitors (1 of 12 university-wide) to deliver a 3-minute pitch presenting my research on AI-driven materials discovery to a broad, non-specialist audience.
Presentations & Teaching
A comprehensive overview of my conference presentations, teaching experience, and science communication activities showcasing my research in computational materials science and AI-driven materials discovery.
13
Conference Presentations
6
Awards & Honors
5
Invited & Spotlight Talks
1
Teaching Certificate
Conference Presentations
2026
May
MRS Spring Meeting & Exhibit
"Migration as a Probe—A Generalizable Benchmark Framework for Specialist vs. Generalist Machine-Learned Force Fields in Doped Materials"
Oral
May
MRS Spring Meeting & Exhibit
"What is Your Force Field Really Learning? Gaining Scientific Intuition and Guiding Feature Engineering with A Dual-Level Explainability Framework"
Oral
Apr
MRS Spring Meeting & Exhibit
"Overcoming Contextual Tunneling in AI-Driven Materials Discovery: A Causal Framework for Robust Knowledge Integration"
Oral
Mar
Women in Data Science and AI Symposium
Best Poster Award
Mar
Women of Whiting Annual Women in STEM Symposium
Top 1 Poster
Jan
AAAI XAI4Science Workshop
"What is Your Force Field Really Learning? Gaining Scientific Intuition with a Dual-Level Explainability Framework"
Spotlight
Spotlight Talk (Top-tier recognition). One of the workshop's spotlighted contributions on explainable AI for scientific machine learning.
2025
Dec
NeurIPS AI4Mat Workshop
"Migration as a Probe: A Generalizable Benchmark Framework for Specialist vs. Generalist Machine-Learned Force Fields"
Spotlight
Spotlight Talk & Travel Grant Awardee.
Nov
AIChE Annual Meeting 2025
"Dissecting Cr-Doped Interfaces: How Diffusion Dynamics Reshape the Van Der Waals Gap and Shift Sb₂Te₃ Thermoelectric Performance"
Poster
Oct
Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) Society Annual Conference 2025
Invited
- Doctoral Symposium — Selected as 1 of 10 PhD students globally; showcased AI applications in predictive maintenance.
- Chaired "Advanced AI/ML for PHM" and "Digital Twins and Aviation" sessions.
Jul
Artificial Intelligence for Materials Science (AIMS) Workshop, NIST
Poster
Apr
Women in AI 2025
"Exploring Low-Energy Pathways for Self-Healing Defects in CsPbBr₃—A Computational Study"
Award
Feb
Quantum Matters in Materials Science Workshop, NIST
"Topological Materials Engineering for Next-Generation Thermoelectrics"
Poster
Teaching & Communication
Johns Hopkins Teaching Institute
Completed comprehensive pedagogical training through the JHU Teaching Institute, including coursework on evidence-based teaching methods and inclusive classroom practices.
Completed a micro-teaching project and received an official teaching certificate recognizing proficiency in university-level instruction.
2025 Yi Cao. This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.