I'm recruiting PhD students for 2025! (please read before contacting)

I’m now recruiting PhD students to start fall quarter 2025 through both the Department of Linguistics and the Halıcığlu Data Science Institute!

It is really truly not necessary to reach out to me directly. If you apply through UCSD’s portal, I will read your application. But if you insist on writing to me, please send an email with “[PhD Applicant]” in the subject line. Briefly describe your research interests, include a CV, and pitch a project or two that you might work on as a PhD student. I can’t respond to everyone, but I do read your emails.

The ideal candidate has strong programming skills, experience with ML engineering, and a sense of curiosity and wonder about human language! You have to apply through the portal linked on one of the department websites linked above. If you are unsure which program to apply to, I strongly suggest reviewing the requirements for each.

To get a sense of what I generally work on, you can review my list of publications. Some examples of topics I’m interested in pursuing with PhD students are:

• LMs as test subjects for language acquisition studies
• engineering and training developmentally plausible LMs
• controlled manipulations of pretraining regimes for LMs
• information theoretic approaches to linguistics and cognition
• Bayesian and experimental pragmatics
• theoretical semantics/pragmatics work on presupposition and relevance
• understanding the contribution of prosody, gesture, facial expression, etc. to meaning
• techniques for training data- and compute-efficient LMs
• multimodal pretraining
• evaluation and interpretability of LMs