If you emailed me, I may have sent you this page. I get many emails from people interested in working with me. This page describes the opportunities in my group.
Are you interested in joining my research group as a PhD student? Great!
I receive a large number of requests asking whether my group has openings and whether I can accept a PhD student. Emailing me directly will not help your application. If you have a specific question, I may be able to answer it.
The Computer Science department in general, and CLSP and Malone in particular, accept PhD students in machine learning, natural language processing, and health every year. Whether my group specifically has a position or not, there are many other faculty with similar interests. I take students most years. There is no need to email ahead asking whether I have open positions since even if I do not, colleagues working in related areas will have openings.
The only way to become a PhD student is to apply.
The admissions committee reviews all PhD applications and makes admission decisions. You do not need to contact me directly, and I will not be able to provide updates on the process.
Read recent publications from your prospective adviser. In my case, I publish on a lot of different topics, but these do not necessarily form the central effort of my students. Instead, look at the thesis topics of my PhD students on the group page. Your thesis will look like those documents.
Everyone in my group works on Artificial Intelligence, specifically methods and models for language data. Students differ in types of models and applications; half work exclusively on core NLP topics, while the other half write NLP papers that consider health applications.
When considering an adviser, look at the jobs their former students accepted. I list the first job of each alum on the group page. Many of my students pursue academic careers, and many have industry research careers. Students decide their own career goals; my job is to help students achieve those goals.
Many students come because we are one of the leading research universities in natural language processing, engineering in healthcare, and AI. Beyond that, I love JHU because you can have a meaningful influence on important problems.
The key to doing transformative work is collaboration. Johns Hopkins has interdisciplinary work in its foundation. Every university says it encourages interdisciplinary work; Johns Hopkins puts in place the policies and practices to support it — CLSP and the Malone Center are two of many examples. Consider Bloomberg Professors, faculty who must be jointly appointed between schools; the department currently has four.
I am particularly interested in health and medicine, an area where JHU is an international leader. I work with the Institute for Clinical and Translational Research to develop clinical NLP that can be integrated into production environments, and with the Center for Population Health Information Technology, the Institute for Global Tobacco Control, and the Center for Gun Policy and Research. We have active projects in vaccination, HIV, tobacco, and infectious disease. I also collaborate extensively with the Applied Physics Lab, home to thousands of researchers.
I often have postdoc positions in my group. I often recruit postdocs through relevant JHU programs: CLSP. There is also the Malone Postdoc Program and the DSAI postdoc program.
I expect postdocs to have multiple publications in research areas relevant to my interests — papers at mainstream NLP and ML conferences, or other related venues. I rarely consider applicants without this experience.
I work with a small number of undergraduate and masters students on research each semester. I collect names of interested students and select candidates from this list at the start of each semester based on available projects.
If you are interested in a project in my lab and are a current JHU undergraduate or masters student, please complete this Google form.
This is a rolling process. I contact students only when a project becomes available; I do not accept or reject submissions, and I will not contact you unless there is an open position. If I do not have a project for you, I will keep your name on file in case something comes up. This form does not take the place of a formal application to JHU, and should only be used by current students.
If you have worked with me and need a letter, please see the recommendation letter page.
I am glad you are considering JHU. I have no input into the masters admission process, so I cannot assist with your application, and I do not provide funding to accepted masters students. Please do not contact me about masters admissions.
I do not generally supervise projects from visiting or summer students who are not Johns Hopkins students. In previous years I have hosted interns through internship programmes run by various groups at Johns Hopkins. Please do not contact me directly about summer internships — I am unlikely to reply.
I do not supervise projects or have research positions for high school students, and I do not have the bandwidth to participate in interviews or similar meetings.
The most important aspect of a PhD program is your adviser. Your interests may drift, projects change, and the people around you will evolve. Your adviser will be a constant — someone you interact with weekly, and the person who will set you on your career path.
I understand the importance of an adviser, so I take my job seriously. My job is to ensure that my advisees are, to the best of my ability, successful, well-educated researchers.
Each advisee has a weekly one-hour meeting with me, usually one on one, plus a group meeting most weeks — short updates from everyone, then one student presenting in detail for about 45 minutes. We also run an active Slack channel. Given the volume of messages I get, I’m not always fast to respond, so students know to flag anything urgent directly.
At the start of each semester, I meet one-on-one with each student to set goals: every research project they’re working on, planned travel, coursework, teaching, and any other major commitments, each with an estimated level of effort. We revisit the list at the end of the semester to see what was accomplished and adjust for the next one. This keeps expectations realistic and gives us a concrete way to talk about what’s working.
I value in-person interaction — sharing an office, informal conversations, seminars and department events — and expect group meetings and one-on-ones to happen in person when possible. At the same time, I make use of a flexible schedule myself and expect the same flexibility for my students. We also do a group lunch once a semester, plus a group outing — see some of our previous group outings.
My goal is to help you develop a research career over which you have ownership. I prefer not to hand students already-formed projects, but instead let them develop their own interests and ideas. Most first-year students need hands-on guidance; that lessens over time. Around year three I discuss longer-term goals with each student, both thesis and career, and we continue that conversation until graduation. I provide opportunities tailored to those goals — teaching, mentoring other students, research talks, internships, and grant writing. My goal is to help you find a job that you want, not one that I want — I already have a job.
I’m supportive of students taking on projects outside our core group work, whether with other faculty or with labmates I’m not directly involved in — it’s a natural part of growing as a researcher. We just make sure any side project is folded into the semester planning above, so it doesn’t crowd out the primary goal of making steady progress toward graduation.
As for authorship: I aim to be a co-author only where I’ve made a real contribution to the work. Being a student’s advisor or funder doesn’t by itself put me on a paper.
Many students consider academic careers, so I try to teach students what academic jobs actually entail. As much as possible I share my own activities with students, including my own, constant research and career failures: grant rejections, paper rejections. I want students to have a realistic sense of academic life, successes, and failures alike.
Progress in a PhD is not measured by counting credits, so establishing measures of progress is critical. My goal is for students to graduate in five years.
Not everyone finishes in five years; many students stay in “year three” for a while. But this plan describes most students’ path through the program. Each student sets concrete goals at the start of a semester in a spreadsheet listing every task and estimated level of effort; at the end of the semester we review it and fill in accomplishments and actual effort.
This process serves a few goals: a clear, unambiguous sense of what needs to happen; a realistic expectation of effort, since spelling it out forces real decisions about priorities; a concrete way to tell whether a semester was actually productive; and, when a goal goes unmet, a starting point for talking about what to improve.
PhD programs are challenging, and nearly every student faces periods of struggle. During my own PhD I spent nearly a year on research ideas that all fell apart. The first step is recognizing it. Often the most effective response is to take a break and come back with a fresh approach. If frustration lasts longer, we work out the cause together — slow progress, the wrong topic, unclear feedback from me. I also keep watch and sometimes recognize issues before students do — part of why we also have yearly PhD student reviews and progress letters.
Feedback runs both ways. Students complete an annual self-review that includes adviser feedback, and CLSP has a student–faculty liaison committee for raising issues anonymously. It is important to have a culture of openness so we can all improve.
Beyond our one-on-one work, students get mentorship from others too — faculty they meet through qualifying projects, and senior students in the group. I try to pair newer students with more senior ones so everyone gets hands-on experience early, and those relationships tend to turn into lasting academic and industry contacts.
Students in the group also get the chance to mentor undergraduate and master’s students themselves, which is valuable experience for an academic or industry career. That usually starts with defining a well-scoped project connected to the student’s own research, then working with the undergrad or master’s student on a regular basis with clear milestones — good practice for the kind of advising and management skills that come up again later in a career.
Each student should attend at least one conference a year regardless of papers published.
Nearly every one of my students completes at least one industry internship, and many do two. The sweet spot is usually the third or fourth year, once a student has enough research experience to be useful to a company but is still building out their interests; internships very early tend to be more software-engineering than research, and internships in the final year can slow down graduation, so I generally steer around both. Students also occasionally join a JSALT workshop team.
I encourage all my students to make full use of their available vacation time. Conference travel is work, not vacation — even to a fun destination — though I encourage students to tack personal time onto a conference trip when it makes sense.
During your decision process you will ask lots of questions and hear lots of answers. Where you can, look for data to support them. If a professor says “my students collaborate with many different professors,” look at the students’ publications — do you see evidence of those collaborations? If a professor says “I have students who pursued academic jobs,” look at where the students went.
Keep a running list of factors during open house visits. When you are finished, review the list, identify the most important items, and compare schools on those criteria.
I also urge you to consider non-academic factors. Are there activities outside school work you can pursue? Is the city livable and affordable? Will you find a community outside the university to support you? Success in a PhD program relies on more than a strong academic program — you need to be happy and supported to thrive.
Alexandra DeLucia, my PhD student, co-authored an excellent guide on what to ask a potential adviser. You can read it here.