Brief Bio

Yair Zick is an associate professor at the College of Information Systems and Computer Sciences, UMass Amherst. Prior to that, he was an assistant professor at the NUS School of Computing. He obtained his PhD (mathematics) from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore in 2014, and a B.Sc (mathematics, "Amirim" honors program) from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. His research interests include computational fair division, computational social choice, algorithmic game theory and algorithmic transparency. He received research awards from Google DeepMind, Adobe Research, and MassMutual. He is the recipient of the 2011 AAMAS Best Student Paper award, the 2014 Victor Lesser IFAAMAS Distinguished Dissertation award, the 2016 ACM EC Best Paper award, the 2017 Singapore NRF Fellowship, and the 2025 NSF CAREER award.

Honors and Awards

  • 2025
    NSF CAREER Award
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    Awarded the 2025 NSF CAREER Award.
  • 2021
    IJCAI 2021 Early Career Spotlight
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    Awarded the IJCAI 2021 Early Career Spotlight.
  • 2020
    Outstanding Senior Program Committee Member, AAAI 2020
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    Awarded the AAAI 2020 Outstanding Senior Program Committee member award. It's wonderful to see that AAAI recognizes the hard work put forth by program committee members!
  • 2017
    The 2017 NRF Fellowship
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    The NRF fellowship awarded to 11 early career investigators in Singapore.
  • 2016
    The ACM EC Best Paper Award
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    Our paper "Which is the Fairest (Rent Division) of them All?", coauthored by myself, Moshik Mash, Kobi Gal and Ariel D. Procaccia, won the ACM EC (Economics and Computation) best paper award. The paper had a nice mix of theoretical and empirical results, as well as carefully designed user studies.
  • 2014
    The IFAAMAS Victor Lesser Distinguished Dissertation Award
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    Annually awarded to the best PhD thesis in the multi-agent systems community.
  • 2011
    The AAMAS 2011 Pragnesh Jay Modi Best Student Paper Award
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    I got this award for my first ever research paper (coauthored by my then advisor and current amazing researcher, Edith Elkind), this still is one of the most fun projects I got to work on.
  • 2010 - 2014
    The Singapore International Graduate Award
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    My PhD was generously funded by the Singapore International Graduate Award (SINGA), awarded by the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR). This is a full PhD scholarship awarded to outstanding international scholars wishing to pursue their graduate studies in Singapore.
  • 2007-2009
    "Amirim" Scholarship
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    I was a member of the "Amirim" honors program, accepting a small number of outstanding students from all academic disciplines. The program focused mostly on the arts and social sciences, so it wasn't very "science-y", but it did teach me how to write clearly and academically. Oh, and we got to read The Tempest!

Academic Positions

  • present 2024

    Associate Professor

    UMass Amherst, College of Information Systems and Computer Sciences

  • 2024 2020

    Assistant Professor

    UMass Amherst, College of Information Systems and Computer Sciences

  • 2020 2016

    Assistant Professor

    National University of Singapore, School of Computing

  • 2016 2014

    Postdoctoral Research Fellow

    Carnegie Mellon University, Computer Science Department; hosted by Anupam Datta and Ariel Procaccia .

Education & Training