John Kirchenbauer

John Kirchenbauer is a recent PhD graduate from Prof. Tom Goldstein’s lab at the University of Maryland. He spent the first part of his PhD working on techniques for discerning whether the thing you’re currently reading or looking at was created by a human or generated by an AI system. More broadly, his research has explored trust, transparency, safety, reliability, and scalability in deep learning and he has a long-standing interest in improving our understanding of how a generative model's training data impacts its behavior. He will start a postdoc with Prof. Colin Raffel at the Vector Institute in Toronto in Fall 2026.

Before doing his PhD at UMD, John worked at the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University as a research engineer (FFRDC), completed a BS and MS in Computer Science at Washington University in St. Louis, and received a diploma in Violin from Oberlin College and Conservatory of Music. When not doing research, John likes being in the mountains, and listening to Mahler.