If I am your undergrad/MS advisor, or if you are a Stanford Ph.D. student: please feel free to email me any time about anything!
Other students: Check this page first. If it doesn't answer your question, please shoot me an email!
In all cases, I may take a few business days to respond to email, thanks for your patience.
Q: I would like to attend Stanford for my PhD. Are you accepting students? Can I chat with you about my application?
A: Thanks for your interest! Unfortunately, I do not have bandwidth to engage with every student interested in attending Stanford and/or working with me. As you may know, at Stanford (at least in the EE and CS departments), students are admitted to the department rather than to any one faculty member. So I encourage you to apply to Stanford, and if you are admitted, then I would be happy to chat about research opportunities in my group.
Q: I am interested in doing a post-doc with your group. Do you have any post-doc positions available?
A: Thanks for your interest! If I have any post-doc positions available, it will be advertised on the "Home" page of my website -- so if you don't see such an advertisement, the answer is no. However, you might apply for other post-docs at Stanford, such as the Bloch fellowship (with QFARM) or the Motwani postdoctoral fellowship (from the CS theory group). Both of those typically post calls for applications sometime in the fall.
Q: I’m interested in joining your lab for an internship. Do you have positions available?
A: Thanks for your interest, but I do not have research positions (paid or unpaid) available for non-Stanford students (including high-school students).
Q: I have some research ideas that may be related to your work. Can you give me feedback and/or collaborate?
A: Thanks for your interest! Until recently, the answer would have been "absolutely, please email me and we can discuss!" However, since the advent of LLMs being able to do decent math (approximately Summer 2026) I have been getting too many of these emails to seriously engage with. It's great that LLMs are making research more accessible, but it does make it hard to keep up :) If you have research ideas or results directly related to one of my papers, then please do email me and I'll try to engage. However, if you are a NON-Stanford undergraduate or a high-school student with research ideas in my general area but not directly related to one of my papers, then I'm really sorry, but I don't have bandwidth right now to give you feedback or collaborate. But it's great that you are interested in research and I encourage you to pursue it! If your question about your research ideas is "is this interesting/novel?" then my canned responses are: (a) if you think it's interesting, then it's interesting! You just have to articulate why you find it interesting to convince others; and (b) LLMs these days are quite good at literature reviews, so if you want to know if your result/ideas are novel, I'd suggest asking Claude/GPT/etc.
Q: I am an undergraduate interested in research. Can I do research with you?
A: Maybe! The best way to get involved with undergraduate research is through Stanford programs like CURIS (CS dept), the EE REU (EE dept), or SURIM (Math dept). If I am looking for undergraduate researchers for a project in my group, I will post it on the CURIS website, so you can check there. I do occasionally do research with undergrads without first doing CURIS or another research program, but it’s the exception, and you need to have taken my class CS250/EE387 first. If you have taken CS250/EE387 and are interested, feel free to ask me about it!
As an aside, another great way to see what theoretical CS research is about is to join us for theory lunch! There's lunch, chatting, and then a short research talk.
Q: Will you write me a recommendation letter for the CS coterm? Can/should we meet about it?
A: If you've taken any of my courses, are my undergrad advisee, or have substantially interacted with me in some other way, I'm almost certainly happy to write you a letter for the CS coterm. (Although of course the letter will be stronger if I know you and your work better). If you think I'm a good person to write you a letter, please email me about it, and also please attach your resume and transcript so that I can write a letter that’s more in sync with your application. Please also let me know if there’s anything in particular you would like me to mention in my letter, for example an assignment you were particularly proud of. There's no need to meet in person about it, and also no need to write a long email about how much you loved CS161 -- flattery will get you everywhere, but it's not needed here :)
Note that I am unable to write a letter for you if you don’t contact me at least a week before the deadline. Thank you for understanding.
UPDATE: I will be on leave for the calendar year of 2027, and unfortunately will not be able to write coterm letters (except for students I know very very well) during that time.
Q: When will you next be teaching CS161 (Design and Analysis of Algorithms)?
A: If you don't know, then I probably don't know either. But all of us who teach CS161 use a common base of materials, so you'll get a similar experience no matter who you take CS161 with. Moreover, the other CS161 instructors are awesome! So I encourage you to take CS161 whenever it best fits into your schedule.