People
People in reinforcement learning
57 people in the USASI People directory whose profiles list reinforcement learning as a field of their work. Listed alphabetically; this is not a ranking. Each profile covers public professional work only, cited to official pages.
Adam Gleave
Co-founder and CEO (since January 2022), FAR.AI
Co-founder and CEO of FAR.AI; researcher on adversarial robustness and reward learning
Aditya Grover
Co-founder and CTO, Inception
Co-founder and CTO of Inception; Assistant Professor of Computer Science at UCLA leading the MINT group
Albert Jiang
Research scientist (since June 2023), Mistral AI
Research scientist at Mistral AI; first author of the Mistral 7B and Mixtral of Experts papers
Alexander Wettig
Researcher working on RL for the Composer models, Cursor
Researcher at Cursor; contributor to Ai2's OLMoE and co-author of SWE-bench
Aravind Srinivas
Cofounder and CEO, Perplexity
Co-founder and CEO of Perplexity; first author of CURL and Bottleneck Transformers
Bob McGrew
Listed under executive leadership in the OpenAI o1 System Card (2024), OpenAI
Listed in OpenAI's executive leadership on the o1 System Card; led aspects of OpenAI's robot-hand research
Chelsea Finn
Assistant Professor in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, Stanford University
Stanford assistant professor who runs the IRIS lab; co-founder of Physical Intelligence and co-author of π0
David Ha
Co-Founder & CEO, Sakana AI
Co-founder and CEO of Sakana AI; former Google research scientist and co-author of World Models
David Silver
CEO, Ineffable Intelligence
CEO of Ineffable Intelligence and UCL professor; formerly led DeepMind's reinforcement learning team
Deepak Pathak
Co-founder and CEO, Skild AI
Co-founder and CEO of Skild AI; Raj Reddy Associate Professor at Carnegie Mellon University
Denis Yarats
Co-founder and CTO, Perplexity
Co-founder and CTO of Perplexity; first author of DrQ-v2 for reinforcement learning from pixels
Denny Britz
Listed with a Google Brain affiliation on the 2017 NMT architecture paper, Google Brain
First-listed author of a 2017 Google Brain study of NMT architectures; contributor to its TensorFlow framework
Edward Beeching
Machine Learning Research Scientist, Hugging Face
Hugging Face research scientist; credited author of the TRL library and co-first author of Zephyr
Eiso Kant
Co-founder and co-CEO, Poolside
Co-founder and co-CEO of Poolside, which builds open-weight foundation models for agentic coding
Eric Mitchell
Co-lead of the Post-training Frontiers team (with Yann Dubois), OpenAI
Co-lead of OpenAI's Post-training Frontiers team; co-author of Direct Preference Optimization (DPO)
Gavriel State
Senior Director for Simulation and AI, NVIDIA
Senior Director for Simulation and AI at NVIDIA, heading the team behind Isaac Sim and Isaac Lab
Hado van Hasselt
Research scientist, Google DeepMind
Research scientist at Google DeepMind working on reinforcement learning; first author of Double DQN
Jakob Foerster
Associate Professor, Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford
Oxford associate professor and research scientist at FAIR (Meta); first author of COMA for multi-agent RL
Jakub Pachocki
Chief Scientist, OpenAI
Chief Scientist at OpenAI; overall pretraining lead for GPT-4; set research direction for OpenAI Five
Jan Leike
Leads the Alignment Science team, Anthropic
Leads the Alignment Science team at Anthropic; formerly co-led Superalignment at OpenAI
Jeff Clune
Professor, Computer Science, University of British Columbia
UBC professor and Recursive co-founder; former OpenAI research manager and Senior Research Advisor to DeepMind
Joelle Pineau
Chief AI Officer, Cohere
Chief AI Officer at Cohere and McGill professor; led Meta's FAIR research team from 2017 to 2025
Johannes Hagemann
Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, Prime Intellect
Co-founder and CTO of Prime Intellect; co-author of the INTELLECT-1, INTELLECT-2 and INTELLECT-3 reports
John Langford
Partner Researcher Manager, Microsoft Research
Partner Researcher Manager at Microsoft Research; principal developer of Vowpal Wabbit
John Schulman
Cofounder and chief scientist, Thinking Machines Lab
Co-founder and chief scientist of Thinking Machines Lab; OpenAI co-founder and first author of PPO and TRPO
Jonathan Hurst
Co-founder and Chief Robot Officer, Agility Robotics
Co-founder and Chief Robot Officer of Agility Robotics; Oregon State University professor of robotics
Josh Albrecht
CTO and co-founder, Imbue
Co-founder and CTO of Imbue and first author of the Avalon reinforcement learning benchmark
Justin Fu
Research scientist, Waymo Research (since August 2021), Waymo
Research scientist at Waymo Research and lead developer of the open-source Waymax driving simulator
Katja Hofmann
Partner Research Manager, co-leading the People-Centric AI research area, Microsoft Research Cambridge
Partner Research Manager at Microsoft Research Cambridge who led the Muse (WHAM) gameplay model project
Kenneth Stanley
SVP of Open-Endedness, Lila Sciences
SVP of Open-Endedness at Lila Sciences; former Open-Endedness Team Leader at OpenAI and creator of NEAT
Koray Kavukcuoglu
SVP, Google DeepMind, Google DeepMind
SVP of Google DeepMind and Chief AI Architect at Google; co-author of the DQN and WaveNet papers
Leandro von Werra
Machine learning engineer in the open-source team, Hugging Face
Machine learning at Hugging Face; first listed author of TRL and co-author of StarCoder2 and smolagents
Lewis Tunstall
Machine learning engineer working on post-training, Hugging Face
Works on post-training at Hugging Face; first author of Zephyr and a listed author of TRL
Lilian Weng
Author, Lil'Log
Author of Lil'Log, a blog of long-form learning notes on machine learning research
Mika Senghaas
Research engineer, Prime Intellect
Research engineer at Prime Intellect; first author of the INTELLECT-3 and PRIME-RL reports
Misha Denil
Research Scientist (10 years), Google DeepMind
Former Google DeepMind research scientist whose work includes data-driven robotics and learned optimizers
Nathan Lambert
Co-founder and Executive Director, Trillium Labs
Co-founder of Trillium Labs; first author of the Tülu 3 report and former post-training lead at Ai2
Niko Grupen
Head of Applied Research (joined early 2023), Harvey
Head of Applied Research at Harvey; lead byline on the Legal Agent Benchmark (LAB) announcement
Noam Brown
Research Scientist, OpenAI
OpenAI research scientist working on reasoning; creator of Libratus and Pluribus; CICERO co-author
Oriol Vinyals
Vice President, Google DeepMind, Google DeepMind
Vice President at Google DeepMind; co-author of sequence-to-sequence learning and the TensorFlow white paper
Paul Christiano
Executive Director, Alignment Research Center
Executive director of the Alignment Research Center and technical advisor at NIST's CAISI
Pieter Abbeel
Professor, Jim Gray Chair of Engineering; Director of the Berkeley Robot Learning Lab; Co-Director of BAIR, University of California, Berkeley
UC Berkeley professor and Robot Learning Lab director; Amazon Scholar; former OpenAI research scientist
Richard Sutton
Professor, Faculty of Science - Computing Science, University of Alberta
University of Alberta professor of computing science; co-founded Google DeepMind Alberta in 2017
Sergey Levine
Associate Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of California, Berkeley
UC Berkeley associate professor working on robot learning; co-author of the π0 robot foundation model paper
Shengjia Zhao
Chief Scientist for the new lab effort (as stated by Meta in July 2025), Meta Superintelligence Labs
Researcher at Meta Superintelligence Labs; earlier a contributor to GPT-4 and OpenAI o1
Shimon Whiteson
Professor of Computer Science, University of Oxford
Oxford professor of computer science and Research Director at Google DeepMind; works on multi-agent RL
Shixiang Shane Gu
Senior Staff Research Scientist (Gemini Thinking team), Google DeepMind
Senior staff research scientist at Google DeepMind on Gemini; co-author of Gumbel-Softmax and zero-shot CoT
Siddharth Narayanan
Listed organization on GitHub profile, Edison Scientific
First author of FutureHouse's ether0 chemistry reasoning model and the Aviary language-agent framework
Susan Zhang
Built the LLM training infrastructure that created OPT-175B, Meta AI / FAIR
Co-first author of Meta AI's OPT; built LLM training infrastructure at FAIR and RL systems for OpenAI Five
Timothy Lillicrap
Director of Research, Google DeepMind
Director of Research at Google DeepMind and CIFAR program co-director; works on deep RL for control
Tom Schaul
Senior staff research scientist; leads a reinforcement learning team, Google DeepMind
Google DeepMind senior staff research scientist and RL team lead; Prioritized Experience Replay author
Tuomas Haarnoja
Research Scientist, DeepMind
First author of Soft Actor-Critic and a bipedal robot soccer paper; joined DeepMind after a Berkeley PhD
Vikash Kumar
Co-founder, CEO, Myolab.ai
Co-founder and CEO of Myolab.ai and CMU adjunct professor; lead creator of MyoSuite and RoboHive
Volodymyr Mnih
Research scientist, Google DeepMind
Research scientist at Google DeepMind; first author of the deep Q-network (DQN) and A3C papers
Weizhu Chen
Technical Fellow and Corporate Vice President, leading a modeling team, Microsoft AI
Technical Fellow and CVP at Microsoft AI; senior author of LoRA, DeBERTa and Samba
Wojciech Zaremba
Head of AI Resilience, OpenAI Foundation
OpenAI co-founder; Head of AI Resilience at the OpenAI Foundation
Younes Belkada
Machine Learning Engineer, Hugging Face
Listed author of Hugging Face's TRL library and co-author of the StarCoder2, Zephyr, and LLM.int8() papers
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