Tyler Derr - Bios

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Dr. Tyler Derr is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Vanderbilt University and Director of the Network and Data Science Lab. His research advances graph machine learning and data-centric AI, with applications such as social networks, recommender systems, and drug discovery. He has published 60+ papers in top AIDMML venues, received the NSF CAREER Award and numerous other research accolades, and is active in the research community through major conference leadership, tutorials, and mentoring award-winning students.

v2

Dr. Tyler Derr is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Vanderbilt University and Director of the Network and Data Science Lab. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Michigan State University in 2020 under the supervision of Jiliang Tang. His research advances graph machine learning and data-centric AI, with applications such as social networks, recommender systems, and drug discovery. Tyler has published over 60 papers in top AI, data mining, and machine learning venues. He has received the NSF CAREER Award, an NVIDIA Academic Grant Program Award (2024), a Young Investigator Best Paper Award at KDD’25 Health Day, and a Best Paper Award at the GLFrontiers Workshop at NeurIPS’23, along with multiple Vanderbilt honors for teaching and mentorship. He is active in the research community through major conference leadership, tutorials, and mentoring award-winning students, and his work has been recognized with best paper awards and invited talks at leading international conferences and institutions worldwide.

v3

Dr. Tyler Derr is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Vanderbilt University and Director of the Network and Data Science Lab. His research advances graph machine learning and data-centric AI, with applications such as social networks, recommender systems, and drug discovery. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Michigan State University in 2020 under the supervision of Jiliang Tang and has since published over 50 papers in top AI, data mining, and machine learning venues, with an h-index of 30+ and i10 index 55+. Tyler’s work has been recognized with the NSF CAREER Award, an NVIDIA Academic Grant Program Award (2024), the Young Investigator Best Paper Award at KDD’25 Health Day, and a Best Paper Award at the GLFrontiers Workshop at NeurIPS’23. He has also received multiple Vanderbilt honors for teaching and mentorship, including the Career Catalyst Impact Award (2025), the Provost Immersion Grant for Faculty (2024), and the School of Engineering’s Teaching Innovation Award (2020). He is active in the research community through major conference leadership, including service on organizing committees for KDD, CIKM, SDM, WSDM, and DSAA, and has earned three Best Reviewer Awards. Tyler’s mentorship has led to numerous student accolades, including university-wide awards, best paper honors, and competitive fellowships. An advocate for research dissemination and education, he has delivered tutorials on Graph Neural Networks at AAAI, KDD, CIKM, and SDM, and given invited talks at venues including the ACM Web Conference’s Knowledge Graph Day, Tsinghua University’s Foundation Model Research Center, Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences, and Nanyang Technological University.

v4

Dr. Tyler Derr is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Vanderbilt University, where he directs the Network and Data Science Lab. His research spans graph machine learning, data‑centric AI, and applications in social networks, recommender systems, drug discovery, and neurodiversity. He has published 50+ papers in top AI/ML venues, received the NSF CAREER Award, and serves as Associate Editor for ACM TKDD and IEEE TBD. Tyler is active in the research community through organizing major conferences, delivering tutorials, and mentoring award‑winning students.

Dr. Tyler Derr is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science, Teaching and Affiliate Faculty in the Data Science Institute, and Faculty Fellow in the Frist Center for Autism and Innovation at Vanderbilt University. Before that, he received his PhD in Computer Science from Michigan State University in 2020 under the supervision of Dr. Jiliang Tang. He has published 60+ papers in highly ranked journals and top conference proceedings, with h-index 30+ and i10-index 55+ (Google Scholar).

Tyler directs the Network and Data Science (NDS) lab, which conducts research in the areas of data mining and machine learning, with emphasis on social network analysis, deep learning on graphs, and data science for social good with applications in drug discovery, education, political science, and neurodiversity. He has mentored his Ph.D. students to receive numerous honors and awards, including Vanderbilt’s C. F. Chen Best Paper Award in 2022 and Runner-Up Award in 2023, the sole recipient of Vanderbilt’s Graduate Leadership Anchor Award for Research in 2023, Finalist in Vanderbilt’s Three Minute Thesis (3MT) Competition in 2023, 1st place in Vanderbilt’s AI Showcase in 2024, and Vanderbilt’s Outstanding Doctoral Student Award in 2024. They have also received the NVIDIA Academic Hardware Grants in 2022 and the DOE Computational Science Graduate Fellowship in 2024.

He is actively involved in the research community, both through publishing extensively at top conferences and serving as a reviewer and committee member (AC/SPC/PC), earning three Best Reviewer Awards. His research has also been recognized with the Best Paper Award at the GLFrontiers Workshop at NeurIPS’23, the Best Student Poster Award at SDM’19, and Paper Digest selections for top-10 Most Influential Papers at CIKM’22 and WWW’23. He has served on organizing committees for major international conferences, including CIKM, DSAA, KDD, SDM, and WSDM, and co-founded the Machine Learning on Graphs (MLoG) Workshop series, which has run for six iterations. In addition, he serves as an Associate Editor for Tsinghua Science and Technology, ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data, and IEEE Transactions on Big Data.

Passionate about education and dissemination, he has delivered tutorials on Graph Neural Networks at AAAI, CIKM, KDD, and SDM, and given numerous invited talks at places including the ACM Web Conference’s Knowledge Graph Day, Tsinghua University's Foundation Model Research Center, Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences, and Nanyang Technological University (NTU).

Tyler has been recognized for research excellence through several prestigious honors, including the NSF CAREER Award (2023), an NVIDIA Academic Grant Program Award (2024), Young Investigator Best Paper Award from KDD Health Day (2025), and selection for the Visiting Faculty Research Program at AFRL/RI (2023). Additionally, he has received multiple Vanderbilt awards for excellence in teaching and mentorship, including the School of Engineering’s Fall 2020 Teaching Innovation Award, the 2024 Provost Immersion Grant for Faculty, and the 2025 Career Catalyst Impact Award.