BAIR Lab Celebrates 2026 PhD Graduates in AI Research
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The Berkeley AI Research (BAIR) Lab is celebrating its Ph.D. graduates of 2026, and the list of where they're headed reads like a who's who of the AI world.…
The Berkeley AI Research (BAIR) Lab is celebrating its Ph.D. graduates of 2026, and the list of where they're headed reads like a who's who of the AI world. This year's cohort worked across robotics, large language models, computer vision, AI safety, and even generative modeling for biology. They published influential research, built real-world systems, and mentored their peers along the way.
Among the standout placements, Baifeng Shi is joining Physical Intelligence as a Member of Technical Staff, building generalist vision and robotic models. Charlie Snell, who studied how to trade off and bridge test-time scaling with pretraining, is also heading to industry. Hanlin Zhu is going to OpenAI as a Member of Technical Staff, while Haozhi Qi splits his time between Amazon as a research scientist and a faculty position at the University of Chicago. J.D. Zamfirescu-Pereira will be an assistant professor in computer science at UCLA. Eve Fleisig is taking a postdoc at Princeton CITP, focused on making LLMs work fairly for diverse users.
Some graduates are still exploring their next move. Devin Guillory, who researched data shifts in computer vision, says he's "building collaborative AI systems, looking for conspirators." Jiachen Lian, working on human-centered AI for speech and healthcare, is actively seeking AI talent to join his startup. Others like Josh Kang (off to Mistral AI) and Grace Luo (a research scientist in industry) have already locked down their roles. Bear Xiong, a PhD candidate focusing on generative modeling for proteins, is still finishing up.
The BAIR lab thanked Stanford AI Lab for the idea behind this public celebration. It's a powerful reminder that the top AI research labs are feeding talent directly into both academia and the industry's most competitive companies. If you're in the field and looking for collaborators, several of these new graduates are open to hearing from you.