Colin Raffel
Colin Raffel is a machine learning researcher whose work centers on learning from limited labeled data. He is an associate research director at the Vector Institute and an associate professor at the University of Toronto. Before joining UNC Chapel Hill, he spent four years at Google Brain, where he co-wrote the T5 paper. In 2022 he received an NSF CAREER Award for a five-year grant of more than $535,700. He co-authored Scaling Data-Constrained Language Models, which NeurIPS named an Outstanding Paper runner-up in 2023.
- Now at
- Vector Institute and University of Toronto
- Works
- 152
Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 15 October 2026. Citations and h-index are hidden because this OpenAlex record may be incomplete or mix in other authors.
Timeline
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2009–2016
Degrees from Oberlin, Stanford and Columbia
He earns a mathematics degree at Oberlin College in 2009 and a master's in music at Stanford University in 2010. He completes a doctorate in electrical engineering at Columbia University in 2016.
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2016–2020
Four years at Google Brain
He spends four years working with Google Brain before joining UNC Chapel Hill.
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February 2020
The T5 text-to-text model
He co-writes the paper Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer, which introduces T5 and the C4 corpus.
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2020
An assistant professor in Chapel Hill
He joins the UNC Chapel Hill computer science faculty as an assistant professor in 2020. His research focuses on learning from limited labeled data.
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2022
An NSF CAREER Award
He receives an NSF CAREER Award in 2022 for a five-year grant of more than $535,700 on collaborative model training.
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2023
A NeurIPS runner-up citation
He co-authors Scaling Data-Constrained Language Models, which NeurIPS names an Outstanding Paper runner-up in 2023.
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April 2025
A move from North Carolina
In April 2025, the University of Toronto's computer science department shares a Toronto Life article about his move from North Carolina to Toronto.
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As of October 2026
Associate research director at Vector
He is an associate research director in AI engineering and infrastructure at the Vector Institute, and an associate professor at the University of Toronto.
Sources and credits
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- Colin Raffel - Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence
- Raffel joins UNC CS faculty for Fall 2020 - UNC Computer Science
- Exploring Transfer Learning with T5: the Text-To-Text Transfer Transformer
- Raffel receives NSF CAREER Award - UNC Computer Science
- NeurIPS 2023 Awards
- Toronto Life: “Everyone should have a voice in tech”: Machine learning researcher Colin Raffel explains his decision to move from North Carolina to Toronto