Emma Brunskill

I am an associate tenured professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University. My goal is to create AI systems that learn from few samples to robustly make good decisions, motivated by our applications to healthcare and education. My lab is part of the Stanford AI Lab, the Stanford Statistical ML group, and AI Safety @Stanford. I was previously an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University. My work has been honored by early faculty career awards (National Science Foundation, Office of Naval Research, Microsoft Research (1 of 7 worldwide)). My and my amazing lab members' research has received 10 best research paper nominations and awards (Uncertainty in AI, Decision Analysis Society, Computer Human Interactions, Educational Data Mining x3, Learning Analytics and Knowledge, Reinforcement Learning and Decision Making Symposium x2, Intelligent Tutoring Systems). I currently serve on the advisory boards of Reinforcement Learning and Decision Making (RLDM conference), the Modern Classrooms Project, and the NSF AI institute for Societal Decision Making. I am on the Stanford Faculty Women's Forum Steering Committee. I previously served on the International Machine Learning Society (which coordinates ICML) Board and the Women in Machine Learning (WIML) board. I also was part an informal Khan Academy research advisory committee from 2021 to 2024. I am an associate director for the Stanford Causal Science Center.

One of the things I am most proud of is my lab alumni, who have gone on to exciting next steps including as tenure-track and tenured faculty (Carnegie Mellon University, University of Cambridge, University of California Irvine, University of Hawaii, University of Massachussets Amherst, and University of Montreal), and research scientist positions (Google, Meta, OpenAI, Amazon).

I served as the co-program chair for the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) 2023 in Hawaii.

Prospective PhD student applicants: Thank you for your interest! I generally take on new PhD students every year. Admission decisions are made at the departmental level. Please don't hesitate to reach out to me after you are admitted. Unfortunately I generally won't be able to talk to prospective students until after admissions decisions have been made.

Photo by Jess Alverenga