Jocelyn Qiaochu Chen

Email: jocelyn.chen [at] ualberta.ca | Office: University Commons, 7-256 | Twitter | Google Scholar | ORCID

I am currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Alberta and an Amii fellow. I also hold a Canada CIFAR AI Chair.

I obtained my PhD at the University of Texas at Austin with Isil Dillig and Greg Durrett. Prior to that, I did my Bachelor at the Univeristy of Wisconsin - Madison.

My research areas include programming languages, formal methods, and natural language processing. More specifically, I do research on program synthesis and neurosymbolic programming.

 

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ELLIS PhD ProgramI am participating as an advisor in the ELLIS PhD Program! If you are interested in working with me, please apply through the ELLIS application portal and indicate your interest in working with me. Applications open on October 1, 2026 and close on October 31, 2026. Please also read my Notes to Prospective Students for research interests and local admission requirements.
I am recruiting PhD students at the University of Alberta to join the PEAR 🍐 (Program Synthesis and Reasoning) group.
I am open to working with (undergrad/grad) research interns if there is a strong match.

Please take a look at my research interests below and Notes to Prospective Students if any of these questions interests you as well.

Research Interests

My current research interests revolve around the following key questions in AI-assisted programming:

Preprints & Publications

[ *: equal contribution.] [ ⁺: equal advising.]
Preprints
Publications

Teaching

Below are the courses I taught at NYU. You can find my slides here.

Service

Students

Current Students
Graduated Students

Notes to Prospective Students

Apply to the UAlberta MSc/PhD program and mention my name in your application. Find the department application instructions here. The application portal will be opened on October 15, 2026. The deadline is December 15, 2026.

Research Scope: My research is grounded in programming languages, formal methods, and program synthesis. I do use LLMs and machine learning extensively, but my core interests are in reasoning about software, programs, and logic — LLMs are one of several tools I use, not the primary object of study. I may be less well-suited to advise students whose primary interest is LLMs or NLP research itself.

Preferred Background (any level): I am especially interested in working with students who are clearly self-motivated and have a solid mathematical background. Prior experience with systems programming is a plus. No prior research experience is required.

Prospective PhD Students: I am recruiting 1-2 fully funded PhD students in the upcoming cycle. Our PhD program assumes prior research training, so we do not directly admit bachelor students into it — if you do not yet hold a research-based MSc, the path is to first apply to our MSc program, which is fully research based and fully funded (equivalent to the first 2 years of a PhD). I treat the MSc as the first stage of PhD training and recruit with the full PhD trajectory in mind; my MSc students are expected to continue into the PhD program. Before emailing, please take a look at a few of my recent papers and briefly mention in your email which directions interest you, why, and what your longer-term research goals are. Please email me at jocelyn.chen@ualberta.ca and include "Prospective Student" in the email subject line.

Undergrad Students at U Alberta and (Remote) Interns: Please fill out this Google Form.

(Due to large number of inquiries, I am not able to respond to all requests.)

Personal

I am originally from Nanjing, China. I go by Jocelyn, though my publications appear under Qiaochu Chen (written as 陈翘楚 in Chinese).