| Roger Levy | Papers | Teaching | Other |
For applications to start in Fall 2025: I will be on leave from late October 2024 until roughly February 2025, so generally won't be able to respond to email inquiries. I remain open to taking on new PhD students starting fall 2025, but you should know that my bandwidth for supervision will be reduced during 2025–2027 due to academic service obligations, so the fit may be best for particularly well-prepared and independent applicants.
I am open to taking on new highly qualified PhD student advisees whose interests are a strong match for my group's work at the intersection of cognitive science, linguistics, psychology, and artificial intelligence. Please make sure to review the information at our lab website's Getting Involved page and on the remainder of this page. You are welcome to contact me with questions that are not answered on these pages, though I can't guarantee that I'll have bandwidth to respond. If you do contact me, please make clear in your message that you have reviewed both these pages; otherwise any response I send will be a short, polite request to review these pages, after which you are welcome to send me a follow-up message (again, making clear that you've reviewed these pages).
In MIT's Brain and Cognitive Sciences PhD program, first-year students do rotations with several PIs and then officially choose an advisor (the choice requires mutual assent, of course) at the end of their first year. If you are potentially interested in doing a PhD in Brain and Cognitive Sciences as my advisee, please apply to our PhD program in the fall and include an explanation of your interest, and in MIT's broader interdisciplinary landscape in language, cognitive science, and computation, as part of your application. Please keep in mind that applications to our program are highly competitive and guarantees of admission are not possible to give.
Successful applicants generally have previous training in some combination of linguistics, computer science (programming, data structures, algorithms, AI), mathematics (calculus, linear algebra, probability/statistics), and/or cognitive science or cognitive psychology. I also strongly value diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice as a core component of my mentorship work and graduate admissions.
I am also open to working with and potentially (co-)supervising students in related PhD programs, such as Linguistics and Computer Science, but at this point I do not generally play a direct role in admissions decisions for PhD programs other than MIT BCS.