Hi! I’m a final-year PhD student in Computer Science at Virginia Tech, advised by Prof. Chandan Reddy. My research interests center on understanding how language models reason, adapt to new scenarios, and how these capabilities can be harnessed toward scientific and open-ended discovery.
During my PhD, I’ve been fortunate to have my work recognized through fellowships and awards, including the VT-CS Outstanding PhD Student Award, the Pratt Fellowship, and two papers nominated as Oral at ICML 2025 (top 1%) and ICLR 2025 (top 1.8%). My research has also been featured in many media outlets like CNBC, HackerNews, Forbes, etc. Along the journey of PhD, I’ve had the opportunity to collaborate with brilliant researchers in the field whose mentorship and collaboration has significantly shaped my research journey: Chandan Reddy (VT), Mehrdad Farajtabar (Apple), Samy Bengio (Apple), Iman Mirzadeh (Apple), Amir Barati Farimani (CMU), Kazem Meidani (CMU), Yuanqi Du (Cornell), Shashank Gupta (AI2), Yunyao Li (Adobe), and Khoa Doan (VinUni).
Before starting my PhD, I completed my MS in Optimization at Virginia Tech, and obtained my BS from Sharif University of Technology.
If you’re interested in my research on how to push LLMs towards open-ended discovery, would like to discuss relevant topics, or explore potential collaborations, please feel free to get in touch :) - I am best reached by email at parshinshojaee@vt.edu
Preprint
NeurIPS 2025
ICML 2025
ICLR 2025
AAAI 2025
ICLR 2024
NeurIPS 2023
TMLR
Conference Reviewer:
Journal Reviewer:
Workshop Reviewer:
Scientist who loves to think, read, garden, and explore music (Tar & Setar)
I was given a chance of life once, I’ve been determined to make it count ever since
Powered by Jekyll and Minimal Light theme.