He is currently a professor and the dean of Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences (IIIS) at Tsinghua University.

In 2015, together with Yang Chen-Ning, he renounced his U.S. citizenship and became an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

[6] From 1986 to 2004, Yao was the William and Edna Macaleer Professor of Engineering and Applied Science at Princeton University,[7] where he continued to work on algorithms and complexity.

Since 2010, he has served as the Dean of Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences (IIIS) in Tsinghua University.

Yao also received the Turing Award in 2000, considered the "Nobel Prize" of computer science, "in recognition of his fundamental contributions to the theory of computation, including the complexity-based theory of pseudorandom number generation, cryptography, and communication complexity".