CS@UNC-Chapel Hill (Tianlong Chen) - We are looking for Ph.D. students (Fall 2025) in AI/ML/Algorithms/Computational Biology!

Why UNC CS?

Department's Why-UNC Page, UNC CS Ranking, Top-4 for Ph.D. Stipend

Who are we?

University of North Carolina, AI Trustworthiness, Efficiency, and for Science (UNITES) Group is an active research lab at UNC Chapel Hill. Our research interests span the area of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), optimization, computer vision, natural language processing, and data science, with two major focuses on (A) establishing robust and efficient AI systems; (B) bridging the gap between AI and societal & scientific challenges.

About PI.

Tianlong Chen (https://tianlong-chen.github.io/) received a Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin, TX, USA, in 2023. He was a postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (CSAIL@MIT), Harvard (BMI@Harvard), and Broad Institute of MIT & Harvard from 2023-2024. He starts as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the Fall of 2024. His research focuses on building accurate, trustworthy, and efficient machine learning systems. He has devoted his most recent passion to various (A) important machine learning problems - sparsity, robustness, learning to optimize, graph learning, and diffusion models; (B) interdisciplinary scientific challenges - bioengineering and quantum computing. He received IBM Ph.D. Fellowship, Adobe Ph.D. Fellowship, Graduate Dean's Prestigious Fellowship, AdvML Rising Star, and the Best Paper Award from the inaugural Learning on Graphs (LoG) Conference 2022.

A good candidate in our opinion:

• Be enthusiastic to research and willing to devote themselves to the problem of interest.
• Have a solid background in mathematics (e.g., linear algebra, optimization, probability).
• Have rich coding experiences and solid coding skills (e.g., Python - Pytorch/TensorFlow is necessary, and C++/CUDA will be highly appreciated).

What we will offer?

• The culture in UNITES lab will be interactive and supportive. Every student will have hands-on research experience with Dr. Chen.
• We will provide strong support and help to students for research assistantships, internships, visits, collaboration, networking, and scholarship opportunities.

How to reach us?

Interested candidates are strongly encouraged to contact me by email (tianlong@cs.unc.edu), together with your resume and transcripts. Besides Ph.D. student candidates, we are also looking for highly motivated students, in terms of internship/visiting students. FYI. Ph.D. application link: https://gradschool.unc.edu/admissions/instructions.html