Victor Zhong

I am an Assistant Professor in the Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo, and a Canada CIFAR AI Chair at Vector Institute. Please visit the R2L Lab website to learn more about my research. I am on Bluesky and Twitter but email is preferred. I am actively looking for strong and motivated students with research experience in Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing. I cannot directly advise more students at this time. I anticipate admitting 2 graduate students and 1 postdoc to start in Sept 2026. If you are interested in working with me, please apply on the R2L Lab website. Unfortunately, due to the volume of requests, I cannot personally comment on individual applications. If you are a company looking to form research collaborations, please email me directly. If you are curious about what my research style might be like as an advisor, please see this article.

Contact

• Office: Davis Centre DC2637
• Email: [email protected]

Education

• 2018-2023: PhD in Computer Science at the University of Washington, advisor Luke Zettlemoyer, supported by Apple AI/ML PhD Fellowship
• 2014-2016: Master of Science in Computer Science at Stanford University, advisor Chris Manning
• 2009-2014: Bachelor of Applied Science in Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto

Roles

• 2024-Present: Assistant Professor at University of Waterloo
• 2024-Present: Canada CIFAR AI Chair at Vector Institute
• 2023-2024: Postdoc Researcher at Microsoft Research New York City, hosted by Miro Dudík
• 2021-2022: Visiting Researcher at Meta AI Research Seattle, hosted by Luke Zettlemoyer
• 2020: Research Intern at Google Brain Robotics, hosted by Pierre Sermanet and Corey Lynch
• 2019: Research Intern at Meta AI Research London, hosted by Tim Rocktäschel, Edward Grefenstette, and Sebastian Riedel
• 2016-2018: Research Scientist at and founding member of Salesforce Research
• 2015: Research Scientist at MetaMind Inc
• 2012-2013: Compiler Software Engineer at Altera Corp