ML PhD / Postdoc Openings — Issue #2: 5 Labs Recruiting (June 2026)

It's June, which means most Fall 2026 PhD application deadlines have long closed. What remains open are rolling postdoc positions, a newly-launched faculty lab accepting PhD students for a coming cycle, and a few NLP groups that run de-facto rolling PhD recruitment. This issue covers five confirmed active openings — each with a direct source URL and a verifiable application pathway as of June 1, 2026.

Yizhong Wang — UT Austin (new faculty, starting Fall 2026)

Type: Multiple PhD students + postdoc + research assistant | Deadline: Rolling (contact directly or apply to UT Austin CS PhD program)

Yizhong Wang is joining the UT Austin CS department as a new faculty member this fall, coming from a research scientist position at Ai2 where he was a core contributor to OLMo, Tülu, and Self-Instruct. His research focuses on how language helps AI systems learn to generalize — spanning instruction tuning, synthetic data generation, reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR), and open language models. Current directions push toward long-horizon autonomous agents and AI for scientific discovery.1

Representative recent papers:

Tülu 3: Pushing Frontiers in Open Language Model Post-Training (COLM 2025)
Hybrid Preferences: Learning to Route Instances for Human vs. AI Feedback (ACL 2025)
Unpacking DPO and PPO: Disentangling Best Practices for Learning from Preference Feedback (NeurIPS 2024)
OLMo: Accelerating the Science of Language Models (ACL 2024 — Best Theme Paper)

How to apply: For PhD admission, apply directly to the UT Austin CS PhD program and name Yizhong Wang as a potential advisor. For postdoc or RA roles, email him a CV with a short description of your research interests.1

Visa support: Not specified on his homepage; standard UT Austin international admissions process applies.

Student working at a computer in a research setting

Hanna Hajishirzi — H2Lab, University of Washington

Type: PhD students + postdoc (rolling) | Deadline: Rolling; also hiring at Ai2 (see allenai.org/careers)

The H2Lab at UW works on foundational research in generative AI and NLP, with a focus on making large language models more powerful, efficient, and open. Key research threads include large language model development and post-training methods, reasoning and RL-based agents, tool use, and scientific AI — the lab is closely affiliated with the OLMo and Tülu lines of open-model work. Papers appear regularly at NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, ACL, EMNLP, and NAACL; as of 2025, the lab's open-source models have been downloaded over 10 million times from Hugging Face.2

Representative recent output:

Hao Xu & Jiacheng Liu, Infini-gram mini (Best Paper, EMNLP 2025)
Hajishirzi named ACL 2025 Fellow (December 2025)

How to apply: To join H2Lab as a PhD student or postdoc, contact Hajishirzi directly through her lab page. For research engineer and scientist roles, active job postings are listed on allenai.org/careers.2 If you are an undergraduate hoping to work in the lab, a questionnaire form is available on her homepage.3

Location: Seattle, WA. International candidates: Ai2 positions explicitly support visa sponsorship; H2Lab handles this through standard UW international graduate admissions.

Ai2 Young Investigator — FlexOlmo (Allen Institute for AI, Berkeley)

Type: Postdoc (1–3 years) | Deadline: Rolling (open listing)

This Young Investigator position sits within the FlexOlmo project at Ai2's Berkeley office, which researches large language models designed for flexible data use — including mixture-of-experts architectures, long-context modeling, and retrieval. The position reports to a UC Berkeley faculty member as the designated Ai2 mentor and carries explicit opportunities to collaborate with BAIR (Berkeley AI Research Lab).4

The research scope covers: new model architectures and training methods adapted for flexible data use, improvements to inference-time conditioning and retrieval, and scientific methods for evaluating and understanding large models. The Ai2 YI program more broadly spans NLP, ML, and AI research — past YIs include Prithviraj Ammanabrolu, Antoine Bosselut, Katie Keith, Maarten Sap, Vered Shwartz, and Swabha Swayamdipta.5

Qualifications: PhD in CS or related field (or completing within one year); strong publication record at NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, or ACL-family venues; experience with LLM training dynamics, scaling, or data curation; MoE/long-context/retrieval experience preferred; in-person in Berkeley required.

Benefits: 1–3 year term, flexible start date, no teaching or grant-writing obligations, travel budget, visa sponsorship, access to Ai2 compute and data infrastructure, and a path to up to $100K in Ai2 research funding after the program.5

How to apply: Submit through the Greenhouse listing. Ai2 does not accept emailed CVs or applications outside the official portal.4

University library — the academic environment where ML/NLP researchers work

Wei Xu — Georgia Tech

Type: PhD + research-oriented MS | Deadline: Rolling (typically apply through GaTech CS PhD admissions, Fall deadline ~Dec 1)

Wei Xu's lab at Georgia Tech works on natural language processing, with a particular focus on text simplification, paraphrase generation, social media language analysis, and grounding language in non-standard or informal linguistic registers. She is actively recruiting and typically takes 1–2 PhD students per year alongside several research-focused MS students and motivated undergrads. Students interested in both programs are encouraged to apply to both PhD and MS tracks, as the lab has more capacity for MS admissions.6

Representative recent publications span ACL, EMNLP, and NAACL; co-advising with Alan Ritter at Georgia Tech is common in the lab. No specific Fall 2027 PhD deadline is listed on her homepage as of June 2026, but GaTech CS PhD applications typically open in September with a December 1 deadline.

How to apply: Reach out to Wei Xu directly if you are interested in joining. For PhD admission, apply to GaTech's CS PhD program; for MS admission, apply to both programs.6

Location: Atlanta, GA. Visa support: handled through GaTech international graduate admissions.

Eunsol Choi — NYU (Courant / Center for Data Science)

Type: PhD (1–2 students) | Deadline: Rolling within current admissions cycle (NYU CS or DS PhD; deadline typically mid-December)

Eunsol Choi is an associate professor at NYU's Courant Institute and Center for Data Science, working on question answering, information extraction, discourse structure, and how models handle ambiguity and contextual meaning in language. Her lab accepts PhD students through both NYU Computer Science and NYU Data Science program applications, and she is recruiting 1–2 students for the coming cycle.7

Representative work includes papers at ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, and NeurIPS, covering open-domain QA, multi-hop reasoning, and long-document understanding.

How to apply: Apply to the NYU CS PhD program or the NYU DS PhD program. Mention Eunsol Choi's name in your application. Note that the upcoming cycle's application window will open in fall 2026 with mid-December deadlines.7

Location: New York, NY. International students: NYU handles visa support through standard international graduate admissions.

Graduate student studying on a laptop — preparing a PhD application

Summary table

PI	Institution	Position type	Deadline	Source
Yizhong Wang	UT Austin	PhD + postdoc + RA	Rolling	homepage
Hanna Hajishirzi	UW (H2Lab)	PhD + postdoc	Rolling	h2lab
Ai2 YI — FlexOlmo	Allen AI (Berkeley)	Postdoc (1–3 yr)	Rolling	Greenhouse listing
Wei Xu	Georgia Tech	PhD + MS	Dec 1 (est.)	homepage
Eunsol Choi	NYU	PhD	Mid-Dec (est.)	homepage

All positions verified from direct source pages on June 1, 2026. PhD admission deadlines marked "est." are based on each institution's typical annual cycle; check program pages in September for confirmed Fall 2027 dates. Rolling postdoc positions can close without notice — apply early.