Week 22 PhD Roundup: 6 open labs from ICML / CVPR / NeurIPS authors — graph ML, embodied AI, program synthesis, and more

Six faculty members with recent top-conference papers posted or maintained active PhD recruiting pages this past week (May 19–25, 2026). Coverage spans six institutions across the US, Asia, and Europe, with positions for Fall 2026 and Fall 2027 intake.

Research area: Graph neural networks, graph mining, social network analysis, LLM-based agents, data science for social good (health, education, autism research).

Derr is an Assistant Professor in the EECS Department at Vanderbilt, and a faculty fellow in the Frist Center for Autism and Innovation. His NDS Lab's recent publications span GNN fairness, recommendation systems, and retrieval-augmented generation. The lab especially encourages applications from underrepresented groups, including those who identify as neurodivergent — this is explicitly stated on the openings page and reflects a consistent lab-culture note across multiple hiring cycles.

What to expect: A single advisor running a tight, focused group. The openings page was last generated May 14, 2026, indicating the listing is actively maintained. Postdoc interest is also welcome — reach out directly.

How to apply: Email tyler (dot) derr (at) vanderbilt (dot) edu with subject "NDS Lab Open Position [YourName]", attach CV, and briefly state research interest.

Research area: Program synthesis, neurosymbolic programming, formal methods × NLP, AI-assisted programming.

Chen is currently a Faculty Fellow/Assistant Professor at NYU Courant and moves to the University of Alberta as an Assistant Professor and Amii researcher in July 2026, also serving as a Canadian CIFAR AI Chair. Her PEAR group (Program Synthesis and Reasoning) works on combining symbolic and neural techniques for correct, scalable program synthesis.

What to expect: 1–2 fully funded PhD spots and 1–2 funded MS positions this cycle. Chen does not recruit directly from undergrad; students typically enter via the master's program first. She values strong math foundations and systems programming experience over prior research credentials. An Apart Research fellowship project (4-month) with her as supervisor is also open through May 31.

How to apply: Email [email protected] with subject "Prospective Student" and a note on your specific research interest. UAlberta undergrads and remote interns: use the intake form.

Research area: Embodied AI, robotic manipulation, multimodal large language models, generative AI (text-to-image/video), 3D vision, autonomous driving.

Li is an Associate Professor jointly appointed in EE and CS at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His lab had 27 papers accepted to ICML, CVPR, ICLR, and AAAI 2026 combined, and 13 papers at NeurIPS 2025 — one of the higher output rates at a single lab active across the NeurIPS/ICML/CVPR stack. 1

What to expect: Recruiting for 2027 intake (not Fall 2026) — plan accordingly. The focus has shifted noticeably toward embodied AI and robotic manipulation this cycle, alongside continued multimodal model work.

How to apply: Contact [email protected]. No formal application form listed — an email with CV and selected papers from the lab you've read is standard practice at CUHK MMlab.

Research area: LLM infrastructure (training, serving, evaluation, transparency), efficient optimization (low-rank methods, model merging, communication-efficient distributed training), federated and privacy-preserving ML.

Wang is an Assistant Professor at Rutgers CS, coming from a senior project scientist role at CMU with Eric Xing's group. His group published ICLR 2026 work (EduVisAgent) and maintains the LLM360 open-source transparent LLM project. The lab recently received an AMD university AI/HPC cluster allocation.

What to expect: Small group (three PhD students currently) — students get direct advisor attention. The research sits at the intersection of systems and ML theory, which suits applicants who want to go deep on infrastructure questions for large models. Recruiting appears ongoing without a stated deadline. 2

How to apply: No formal intake form found on the website. Standard approach: email with CV, 2–3 sentences on which specific research problem you'd work on, and a pointer to any relevant code or papers.

Research area: Statistical machine learning, Bayesian methods applied to healthcare AI (dental/oral disease detection) and biodiversity (acoustic insect monitoring).

Li leads the Translational AI Research Lab in KCL's Faculty of Dentistry. His work is applied-ML with a strong deployment bent — the dental AI project has NIHR i4i product development funding and a formal market pathway. Two recent grants are live: an AI-assisted dental radiology product (NIHR i4i) and an invasive species acoustic monitoring project (NERC).

What to expect: The open position is fully funded, 3-year, on Trustworthy Generative AI in Healthcare — entry dates October 2025 or February/June/October 2026. The lab sits outside the typical CS-department PhD pipeline, which means less competition from pure CS applicants and more collaborative work with dental clinicians. 3

How to apply: Apply via the KCL PhD portal.

Research area: AI for social sciences, social NLP, computational modeling of human behavior, natural language processing.

Liu is joining JHU CS as an Assistant Professor in Fall 2026 and is actively recruiting multiple PhD students for that cohort. The lab's angle — using NLP to understand social dynamics and human behavior — sits at an intersection where relatively few ML-heavy faculty focus, which may mean a less crowded applicant pool for qualified candidates.

How to apply: No personal website found at time of writing — follow @ShichengGLiu on X for application portal updates or email the JHU CS department for confirmation.

For applicants targeting European labs, the ELLIS PhD & Postdoc Program offers dual supervision across 2+ countries, 6 months of international research exchange, and a single centralized application to reach 50–100 partner institutions. The program currently has 500+ enrolled students and is run in partnership with top ML research groups across Europe. 4