Rate My Professor Jeff Clune

Jeff Clune is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia. He serves as Canada CIFAR AI Chair and Faculty Member at the Vector Institute and is co-founder of Recursive. His research focuses on deep learning, including deep reinforcement learning. Previously, he was Senior Research Advisor to DeepMind, research manager at OpenAI, Senior Research Manager and founding member of Uber AI Labs, Harris Associate Professor in Computer Science at the University of Wyoming, and Research Scientist at Cornell University. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science and an M.A. in Philosophy from Michigan State University, and an Honors B.A. in Philosophy from the University of Michigan.

Since 2015, Clune has received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers from the White House, an NSF CAREER award, Outstanding Paper of the Decade and Distinguished Young Investigator awards, and two Test of Time awards. He has authored papers in Nature, Science, and PNAS, and received best paper awards, oral presentations, and invited talks at top machine learning conferences including NeurIPS, CVPR, ICLR, and ICML. His research has been covered in major media outlets. Clune is on leave from January to December 2026.