Faculty Profile: Prof. Alex Lew — Yale CS
Faculty Profile: Prof. Alex Lew — Yale CS
Position: Assistant Professor (joining Fall 2025) Institution: Yale University, Department of Computer Science Lab: Probabilistic and Differentiable Programming at Yale Report date: 2026-06-12
Research Focus
Probabilistic programming, Bayesian inference automation, LLM controlled generation/sampling. Member of GenLM consortium (multi-university): improving controllability, composability, and interpretability of language models via probabilistic programming and Bayesian inference.
Academic Profile
- PhD: MIT CSAIL
- POPL Distinguished Paper, LICS Distinguished Paper
- COLM Outstanding Paper (LLM inference acceleration via sequential Monte Carlo steering)
- Facebook Research Award
- Joining Yale Fall 2025 — lab is brand new, no student placement data
Fit with Weijia Zhang
| Dimension | Assessment |
|---|---|
| LLM agents / agentic AI | ❌ Not primary focus |
| Post-training (SFT / RL) | ❌ Not his area |
| RAG / retrieval | ❌ No |
| LLM inference / controlled generation | ✅ Adjacent (SMC steering of LLMs at COLM) |
| VLM / GUI agents | ❌ No |
Verdict
Low relevance for Weijia’s core interests (SFT, RL, agentic AI). His work is primarily theoretical probabilistic programming with some LLM inference applications. Lab is brand new — no placement data. Not a recommended advisor or committee member for Weijia’s goals.