hiring

Join the Princeton RL group!

• PhD applicants: (Fall 2026) I plan to admit about 2 – 3 PhD student to start in Fall 2027. As long as you mention my name in your statement of purpose, your application will get routed to me. I don’t have bandwidth to respond to emails from applicants. Strong applicants will be well versed in the scientific method (e.g., critically reading/analyzing the literature, hypothesis generation, creative experimental design). They will be comfortable with doing math on a whiteboard. They will have strong metacognitive skills: a clear understanding of what they do and don’t understand, and skills to go learn the latter. They will be curious to learn about all sorts of areas of science and math and engineering and computing. I expect students to contribute to the culture and ethos of the lab; here’s an excerpt from our lab manual describing the goals of the lab:

  To make discoveries and to effectively communicate them. To have fun while we do so. To support each other, but challenge each other too. To give away as many good ideas as possible. To feel no shame when we don’t yet know something, but to fill the gaps and learn everything we can. To be constructive with criticism. To be curious, creative and collaborative. To follow experiments, data, and analyses to whatever interesting conclusions they support, even if those aren’t the conclusions we’d hoped for. To respect each other, to be honest with one another, and to earn the respect of others by how we act. To teach and mentor the younger generation of researchers. To work on what you’re passionate about, work hard at it, and be proud of it.

• Princeton Undergrads: If interested in joining the lab (for independent work or a senior thesis), email me after taking COS435 (or my grad seminar) with your final project, resume, transcript, and the name of a recent paper from my lab that you’ve read. When we meet, I’ll ask you to explain the paper on the whiteboard and explain the key theoretical and empirical results. In my experience, undergraduate research is most successful when students can be fully immersed in the lab, which is often around 20 hr / week.
• Visiting students: If you are a PhD student at another University interested in visiting the RL group for some number of months, email me. In most cases, I will expect that the visit is funded by your home institution.
• Postdocs: I am hiring a postdoc to work on self-supervised approaches to reinforcement learning. Strong experience with RL algorithm implementation is required. Candidates from outside CS (e.g., physics) are welcome to apply. Apply by emailing me, including a resume and a few paragraphs about (both concretely and abstractly) you’d like to achieve by the end of a postdoc.
• Incoming Princeton PhD & MS students: If you’re an existing Princeton MS/PhD student interested in working together, email me with your resume and a few sentences describing what from your past experience/research makes you excited to work on the specific type of reinforcement learning done in my lab.
• High school students: I don’t work with high school students. Check out Princeton AI4All.