PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Ryan Cotterell

Ryan Cotterell is a computer scientist whose research connects natural language processing with linguistics and machine learning. He completed an undergraduate degree in cognitive science at Johns Hopkins and pursued a computer science PhD there, co-advised by Jason Eisner and David Yarowsky, on phonology, morphology, linguistic typology and low-resource languages. His research earned an EMNLP honorable mention in 2015, a NAACL honorable mention in 2016, ACL and EACL Best Paper Awards in 2017, and a Facebook Fellowship in 2018. After a lectureship at the University of Cambridge, he joined ETH Zürich in 2020; his paper “Transformers are Inherently Succinct,” coauthored with Pascal Bergsträßer and Anthony Widjaja Lin, earned an ICLR 2026 Outstanding Paper award. He is an assistant professor of computer science at ETH Zürich and leads the Rycolab; in 2026, he received an ERC Starting Grant to study how large language models learn and apply general rules.

Works
635
Citations
6,738
h-index
45
Badges

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 22 October 2026.

Timeline

  1. 2015

    An EMNLP honorable mention

    He earns an honorable mention at the 2015 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing.

  2. 2016

    A NAACL honorable mention

    In 2016, he receives an honorable mention at the Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the ACL.

  3. 2017

    ACL and EACL best papers

    He earns Best Paper Awards at the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and the European Chapter of the ACL in 2017.

  4. By 2018

    Doctoral research at Johns Hopkins

    He completes an undergraduate degree in cognitive science at Johns Hopkins University, with focal areas in linguistics and computational methods, under Colin Wilson. Jason Eisner recruits him for a computer science PhD at Johns Hopkins. By 2018, he is a member of the Center for Language and Speech Processing, co-advised by Eisner and David Yarowsky, and works on deep learning and statistical approaches to phonology, morphology, linguistic typology and low-resource languages.

  5. 2018

    A Facebook Fellowship

    In 2018, he is one of 17 students selected as Facebook Fellows from a pool of 800 applications, while a PhD student in the Johns Hopkins Department of Computer Science.

  6. April 2026

    An ICLR Outstanding Paper

    In April 2026, ICLR names “Transformers are Inherently Succinct,” by Pascal Bergsträßer, Ryan Cotterell and Anthony Widjaja Lin, one of its two Outstanding Papers. The paper proves that fixed-precision transformers can be exponentially more succinct than linear temporal logic and recurrent neural networks.

  7. September 2026

    An ERC Starting Grant

    In September 2026, ETH Zürich announces that he is one of six ETH researchers to receive an ERC Starting Grant. His project investigates the transformer architecture behind large AI language models and when they learn general rules and apply them to new cases.

  8. Since 2020

    Assistant professor at ETH Zürich

    ETH Zürich appoints him tenure-track assistant professor of computer science in December 2019, and he joins the department in February 2020. Before the move, he serves as a Lecturer in the Computer Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. By September 2026, he is a member of ETH’s Institute for Machine Learning, leads the Rycolab, and researches natural language processing at the intersection of linguistics, artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Career

  1. Since 2020ETH ZurichAssistant Professor of Computer Science
  2. 2021–2026University of Copenhagen
  3. 2020–2025Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  4. 2019–2020University of Melbourne
  5. 2018–2019University of CambridgeLecturer
  6. 2015–2017LMU Munich

Education

  1. Johns Hopkins UniversityPhD

From the biography and OpenAlex affiliations (the years of papers that list the organization), so some years are approximate.

Most-cited works

  1. Gender Bias in Contextualized Word Embeddings2019 · Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL-HLT) · 334 citations
  2. The SIGMORPHON 2016 Shared Task—Morphological Reinflection2016 · SIGMORPHON Workshop on Computational Research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology (SIGMORPHON) · 247 citationsWith David Yarowsky and Jason Eisner
  3. Counterfactual Data Augmentation for Mitigating Gender Stereotypes in Languages with Rich Morphology2019 · Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) · 219 citationsWith Hanna Wallach
  4. CoNLL-SIGMORPHON 2017 Shared Task: Universal Morphological Reinflection in 52 Languages2017 · 187 citationsWith David Yarowsky and Jason Eisner
  5. Information-Theoretic Probing for Linguistic Structure2020 · Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) · 164 citationsWith Adina Williams

From OpenAlex, as of 21 October 2026.

  1. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other universityIncludes Ryan Cotterell. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other university. We compare doctorate and 5+ year employment links, career timing and current workplaces for 187 major-prize and 1,111 best-paper winners.
  2. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labsIncludes ETH Zurich. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labs. We compare publishing careers, recent citations, dual appointments and job moves across 2,420 university researchers and 308 frontier-lab researchers.
  3. The company share of AI researchers’ top papers was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974Includes ETH Zurich. We estimate where the people shaping AI worked when their most-cited papers appeared: the company share was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974, and Google led all organizations in 2020–2024.
  4. Universities had a net outflow of 2,068 moves in AI careersIncludes ETH Zurich. Our estimates of career flows and median h-index across universities and companies in AI, including the role of joint appointments and earlier academic jobs.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

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  1. CS PhD student named 2018 Facebook Fellow - Department of Computer Science cs.jhu.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  2. Ryan Cotterell | Rycolab rycolab.io. Checked 21 October 2026.
  3. Announcing the ICLR 2026 Outstanding Papers – ICLR Blog blog.iclr.cc. Checked 21 October 2026.
  4. [2510.19315] Transformers are Inherently Succinct arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  5. ERC Starting Grant for Ryan Cotterell – Department of Computer Science | ETH Zurich inf.ethz.ch. Checked 21 October 2026.
  6. ERC Starting Grants for six ETH researchers | ETH Zurich ethz.ch. Checked 21 October 2026.
  7. Short news: 2019 – Department of Computer Science | ETH Zurich inf.ethz.ch. Checked 21 October 2026.
  8. Welcome, Professor Ryan Cotterell – Department of Computer Science | ETH Zurich inf.ethz.ch. Checked 21 October 2026.