PhD Positions at Utrecht University in Probabilistic and Differential Programming

Jobs
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(Please forward to any good students you might know!)

Dear all,

We are looking for strong PhD candidates in probabilistic and differential programming for the ERC Starting Grant project “Formalised Reasoning about Expectations: Composable, Automated, Speedy, Trustworthy” (FoRECAST). We are seeking candidates who want to work on novel probabilistic and differential algorithms
(PhD Position in Probabilistic and Differential Algorithms - Working at Utrecht University - Utrecht University)
as well as candidates who are interested in the implementation of systems for differential and probabilistic programming
(PhD Position in DSLs for High-Performance Computing - Working at Utrecht University - Utrecht University).
For context, the FoRECAST project also offers a third PhD position in semantic foundations of probabilistic and differentiable programming
(PhD Position in Programming Semantics and Category Theory - Working at Utrecht University - Utrecht University).

Please contact m.i.l.vakar@uu.nl if you want to learn more about the project.

The starting dates are flexible (but ideally before 1 September 2025). We will therefore review applications on a rolling basis without a fixed application deadline. However, if you want to make sure the positions are still open, please apply before 21 April.

Best regards,

Matthijs Vákár
Assistant Professor in Computer Science
Utrecht University, The Netherlands
m.i.l.vakar@uu.nl

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I don’t know anyone looking for a Ph.D. position in The Netherlands, but I can highly recommend working with Matthijs—he’s not only a world-class programming language theorist, he implemented most of our current parser for Stan when he was a postdoc at Columbia. And from everything I can tell, he’d be a very supportive manager/supervisor.

P.S. I’m not an impartial observer here. I’m really hoping someone works with Matthijs and figures out the low-level differential programming he’s been talking about! I think the Enzyme system from Julia’s doing something similar in that it’s autodiffing down at the LLVM level.

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Thanks so much, Bob! :-) We’ll do our best to figure it out!

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