Prospective Students

Our group is actively looking for self-motivated Ph.D. students. If you are interested in joining our group as a Ph.D. student, you can read more information below.

Research Background

Our group is actively looking for self-motivated Ph.D. students. We welcome all applicants. Experience in parallel programming is not required, but experience in (general) programming and algorithm design would be highly useful.

To get some backgrounds about working on our research area, you are welcome to take CS214: Parallel Algorithms. One of the most recent versions can be found here. Slides and some videos are released here. On the course website there are also some useful reading materials.

In case you can read Chinese, we also translated some of the course materials and wrote some summary articles that can be found on the column on Zhihu. You are more than welcome to read them, and ask me if you have any questions. You can also access the recruiting post on 1point3acres.

Note: the contents in these posts are slightly outdated, but they still provide some useful information about the background for working in our group. If you are interested, you are more than welcome to contact us to get the up-to-date information.

Applying for a Ph.D. Position in Our Group

To apply for a Ph.D. position in our group, you can simply submit an application to our Ph.D. program. You can find information for domestic students and international students, respectively. The application usually opens in Fall (around October). If you are specifically interested in our group, please:

If you are interested, feel free to send us an email to introduce yourself, before or after the application deadline. In the email, you can describe your background, and why you are interested in our group.

Also, please understand that we receive a large number of such emails every day, so we do not reply emails that are obviously generated by AI, or obviously have been sent to a lot of professors instead of targeting for our group.

If we are interested in your application, we will usually contact you in December or early January to schedule a meeting as a short interview, so we can both learn more about each other.

If you are an undergraduate or master student at UCR

In addition to CS214: Parallel Algorithms, there are many other classes that you can get relevant training for doing research in our group, include CS141, CS142, CS218 and CS219. You need to take at least one of these classes before working with us.

We enjoy working with undergrad and master students at UCR, and want to help you succeed in your career. At the same time, we should also acknowledge that research is challenging and requires certain backgrounds and time commitment. Since you usually has other course work to do, please consider seriously if you want to spend a significant amount of time on research.

If you have taken related courses (141, 142, 214, 218, 219) and done well (e.g., You got A+ and solved many bonus problems we gave you), we’ll be more than happy to talk to you and work on some projects together as a bachelor or master thesis or some research project. If not, you should first take these courses since they provide you the relevant background to our research.

We have worked with many UCR undergrad and master students on research topics, many of them then stayed as Ph.D. students either in our group, or accepted Ph.D. offers in other groups, both inside and outside UCR. You can find some information here.

If you are not at UCR and want to join our group as a PhD student

As we mentioned, you can get some relevant backgrounds as we introduced above. While you cannot directly take our classes, many materials have been released online. Again, you can send us an email to express your interest, and we will contact you if we think your background is suitable.