PhD recruitment roundup: 5 openings from top-conference authors (week of June 4, 2026)

What this covers: PhD and postdoc positions actively posted or confirmed open this week by researchers with recent NeurIPS / ICML / ICLR / CVPR / ACL publications. Positions are individually verified via lab websites or public announcements. No unverifiable timestamp = not included.

1. Kaiyuan Zhang — Rutgers ECE (AI agent security)

Institution: Rutgers University, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (Newark / Piscataway) Position: PhD students, interns, visiting students Start date: Fall 2026 and beyond Funding: Fully funded (form-based, no application deadline listed) Application: Fill out this form and optionally follow up by email to kaiyuanzhang@rutgers.edu with subject "[Research Discussion] – Your Name"

Research direction: Security and privacy of real-world agentic AI systems — making LLM agents secure, private, and trustworthy in practice. Preferred experience: agentic AI, LLM post-training, AI security and privacy.

Conference record: ICLR 2023 (workshop best paper), NeurIPS 2023-2025 (reviewer), ICML 2023-2025 (reviewer), CVPR 2024 (reviewer). Recent preprints include BrowseSafe (prompt injection in AI browser agents, co-authored with Perplexity AI team) and LLM Agent Security Principles (co-authored with IBM and Purdue researchers).

Lab culture notes: Zhang is part-time at Perplexity AI while joining Rutgers, so the group will have a strong industry-research connection. He previously ran a machine learning security seminar at Purdue for three years. Undergrads and grad students at Rutgers are also invited to join projects.

Rutgers University ECE — where Zhang joins as an incoming assistant professor in Fall 2026. 1

2. Guanzhi Wang — Northwestern CS (agentic AI & robotics)

Institution: Northwestern University, Department of Computer Science Position: PhD students (Fall 2026 or later cohorts) Start date: Fall 2026 (department start) Funding: Fully funded (standard PhD stipend + tuition) Application: Email or reach out via X/Twitter. Northwestern CS PhD applications go through the standard graduate admissions portal.

Research direction: Code-generating agents, LLMs for robotic policy generation, agentic systems. Wang's doctoral work produced Voyager (the first GPT-4-powered lifelong learning agent in Minecraft), published in NeurIPS 2023, and has been widely cited in the code agent literature.

Conference record: NeurIPS 2023, ICLR (reviewer). Research internship history at NVIDIA Research.

Lab culture notes: Wang is openly recruiting, describing himself as actively seeking PhD students and collaborations on X/Twitter. His background bridges embodied AI and foundation models, which is an unusual combination at a CS department.

x.comhttps://x.com/guanzhi_wang외부 링크

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3. Omar Khattab — MIT CSAIL (NLP systems, DSPy)

Institution: MIT, Department of EECS / CSAIL Position: PhD students (incoming and current) Start date: Rolling Funding: Fully funded via research assistantship Application: Standard MIT EECS PhD application; prospective students should email after submitting their application. See omarkhattab.com for current group members and research direction.

Research direction: Declarative programming for AI pipelines; retrieval-augmented reasoning; learning from sparse language feedback. Two major projects: ColBERT (late-interaction retrieval, widely adopted in enterprise search) and DSPy (the first broad framework for declarative LLM system programming, used by thousands of developers).

Conference record: ACL (multiple years), EMNLP, NeurIPS, ICLR. Khattab's PhD was at Stanford with Christopher Potts and Matei Zaharia; he joined MIT faculty in late 2025.

Lab culture notes: Current group includes students co-advised with Tim Kraska (databases) and Devavrat Shah (statistics/ML), suggesting cross-disciplinary projects are the norm. The lab is small and early-stage, which means PhD students will likely own entire research directions.

4. MLCommons 2026 Rising Stars cohort — 26 institutions hiring or building groups

The 2026 MLCommons ML & Systems Rising Stars cohort announced on May 19, 2026, lists 39 early-career researchers from 26 institutions — UC Berkeley, CMU, Cornell, MIT, Yale, UNC Chapel Hill, UIUC, University of Michigan, National University of Singapore, ETH Zurich, KAIST, and others.

University research library — representing the 26 institutions in the 2026 Rising Stars cohort — The 2026 cohort spans 26 institutions worldwide, including UC Berkeley, CMU, MIT, Yale, UIUC, Michigan, NUS, and ETH Zurich. 4

Many cohort members are advanced PhD students (3rd–6th year) who will enter the faculty market in 2026–2027 or are postdocs now building research groups.

This list is a practical prospecting tool: if you want to work with a future faculty member before they're faculty, reach out now. Cohort members this year work on: LLM inference systems, ML hardware-software co-design, trustworthy AI, multimodal learning, embodied AI, and ML for healthcare / cybersecurity / HPC.

How to use this list:

Visit the cohort page for bios and institutional affiliations
Check each researcher's personal page for open PhD positions — several (e.g., Stefany Cruz at UW, Jae-Won Chung at University of Michigan, Payal Mohapatra at Northwestern) are explicitly in postdoc or PhD stages where new collaborations are accessible
Workshop at AMD HQ in Santa Clara, July 30–31, 2026 — attending in person is one way to make contact

mlcommons.orghttps://mlcommons.org/2026/05/2026-rising-stars/외부 링크

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5. University of Kansas ECE — ML/deep learning PhD assistantship (Fall 2026 / Spring 2027)

Institution: University of Kansas, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Position: PhD student (GRA — graduate research assistantship) Start date: Fall 2026 or Spring 2027 Funding: Fully funded GRA (tuition + stipend) Application: Facebook group post via JUSUA (Joint US-University Academic group); direct contact with faculty required — search "University of Kansas ML PhD 2026" or check KU EECS faculty pages for the specific PI

Research direction: Machine learning and deep learning, network resource management, optimization (NLP, MINLP, convex programming). Intersection of wireless communications and AI.

Conference record: PI has review/publications record at IEEE-affiliated ML and communications venues.

Lab culture notes: Position posted in mid-2026; the GRA package covers tuition and provides a competitive stipend by Midwest standards. This is a reasonable choice for applicants wanting strong industry ties in AI + wireless systems.

How to apply (general tips for this channel's audience)

Each professor above has a different intake process. Broadly: Zhang and Wang have explicit forms or email preferences listed. Khattab follows standard MIT admissions. For the Rising Stars cohort, direct email after checking the person's page is standard. For KU, the Facebook post is the lead — email the PI directly.

For all cold emails: mention one specific paper of theirs, state your most relevant technical background in one sentence, and attach a CV. Professors with recent NeurIPS/ICML papers receive many emails; subject lines like "[PhD Application Inquiry – Your Research Area]" are easier to file than "Inquiry."

Next issue: Monday, June 10. Covers openings posted June 4–10. Got a tip? This channel aggregates publicly posted positions.