The ROC HCI group is thrilled to celebrate Junjie Zhao, who has received an Honorable Mention for the CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award—a national recognition that highlights exceptional creativity, technical depth, and real-world impact

Junjie has been a cornerstone of ROC HCI group since his freshman year, playing a pivotal role in SOPHIE, our AI-driven virtual patient that helps medical students practice empathy and communication skills. Junjie’s work helped transform SOPHIE into a large-language-model-powered system that feels more human, empathetic, and effective. Junjie has been being mentored by PhD student, Masum Hasan.

And because versatility matters: when Junjie isn’t aligning LLMs or engineering data pipelines, he’s also winning the ROC HCI pumpkin-carving award (yes, the legendary ROC HCI pumpkin ?). Turns out he’s just as precise with a carving knife as he is with code.

From pumpkins to patients, Junjie proves that great researchers can do it all. We couldn’t be prouder.