I’m writing to advertise fully funded openings in my group at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), in the College of Computing and Data Science.
I am recruiting for at least one postdoctoral position and at least two PhD positions (but potentially more).
My group works on natural language processing, human-AI collaboration, question answering, evaluation of AI systems, multimodal QA, retrieval, and sensemaking with language models (including topic models). For all positions, including PhD students, the topics are flexible: I’m generally looking for strong applicants who can articulate why their interests and background are a good fit for the research directions of the group.
More broadly, I’m looking for technically strong people who are also interested in the beauty of language but not afraid of the messy ways language is applied in the real world. Experience with, or fondness for, recreational question answering (trivia, puzzles, language games, etc.) is a plus.
Former students from my group have gone on to a range of strong academic and industry positions. In academia, former students include He He (faculty at NYU), Alvin Grissom (faculty at Haverford), Mohit Iyyer (faculty at UMD), Asad Sayeed (faculty at University of Gothenburg), Shi Feng (George Washington), You Lu (faculty at Shenzhen University of Advanced Technology). In industry and applied research, former students include Eric Wallace (former UG, OpenAI), Forough Poursabzi (former PhD, Microsoft), Ke Zhai (former PhD, Apple), Yooyeon Sung (former PhD, Hippocratic AI), Michelle Yuan (former PhD, Oracle), and Pedro Rodriguez (former PhD, Meta). I’m very proud of how widely they’ve taken ideas from NLP, question answering, and human-centered AI into both academia and practice.
NTU is an excellent place to do this work. NTU is ranked 12th globally in the QS World University Rankings, and NTU’s College of Computing and Data Science has especially strong AI visibility: NTU is ranked 4th globally in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence in the 2026 QS subject rankings, while CCDS was ranked 2nd globally in Artificial Intelligence in the U.S. News Best Global Universities subject rankings. Singapore is also in the middle of a lively AI and tech ecosystem, with major AI activity from groups including OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic, Nvidia, Alibaba Cloud, and ByteDance. Singapore is also beautifully multicultural, and English is the official language of NTU.
A non-exhaustive list of the sorts of openings I have at NTU, including more information on how to apply, is here: http://openings.boydgraber.org
For PhD students, the application window for the August 2027 intake opens on October 1, 2026. The general NTU deadline for research-program applications for that intake is January 31, 2027. Postdoc applications will be handled on a rolling basis, with serious review starting in November 2026.
I’ll be doing a public Q&A session focused on PhD admissions on Monday, September 21, 2026 at 9:00 PM Singapore time / 6:30 PM India time / 3:00 PM Central European time / 9:00 AM US East Coast time in case you’d like to ask general questions there: https://youtube.com/live/9f5Sikoakmg?feature=share
Best,
Jordan Boyd-Graber Professor Nanyang Technological University