Tim Althoff

Tim Althoff is a computer scientist whose work applies natural language processing and machine learning to human health and behavior. He studied text-message counseling in 2016, earned a computer science Ph.D. at Stanford in 2018, and joined the University of Washington’s Allen School in 2019. He coauthored PARTNER for peer-support conversations and a 2025 wearable foundation model, and his work received the 2019 SIGKDD Dissertation Award, the WWW 2021 Best Paper Award, and an ACL 2023 Outstanding Paper Award. As of October 2026, he is an associate professor and Jean-Loup Baer Professor in the Allen School.

Now at: University of Washington
Works: 171
Citations: 6,260
h-index: 38

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 27 October 2026.

Timeline

2016

Counseling conversations through NLP

In 2016, he coauthors a natural language processing study of text-message counseling that uses sequence models, language-model comparisons, and message clustering to identify strategies linked to better conversation outcomes.
2018

Degrees in Germany and Stanford

Before his Ph.D., he earns B.S. and M.S. degrees at the University of Kaiserslautern. At Stanford, he earns an M.S. and completes a computer science Ph.D. in 2018, working with Jure Leskovec.
January 2019

Joining the Allen School

In January 2019, he joins the Paul G. Allen School at the University of Washington. His research uses sensor and social data, data science, social network analysis, and natural language processing to study health and well-being.
2019

The SIGKDD dissertation award

At KDD 2019, he receives the SIGKDD Doctoral Dissertation Award for Data Science for Human Well-being. His thesis turns data from mobile and wearable devices into actionable insights for individuals and society.
2021

PARTNER and a WWW award

In 2021, he and his coauthors introduce PARTNER, a deep reinforcement-learning agent that edits peer-support conversations to increase empathy while maintaining conversation quality. The paper receives the WWW Best Paper Award.
2023

An ACL Outstanding Paper

At ACL 2023, his coauthored paper “Cognitive Reframing of Negative Thoughts through Human-Language Model Interaction” is named an Outstanding Paper.
2025

Wearable foundation models

In 2025, he coauthors Scaling Wearable Foundation Models, which introduces LSM, a multimodal foundation model built from up to 40 million hours of sensor data from more than 165,000 people.
As of October 2026

Jean-Loup Baer Professor at UW

As of October 2026, he is an associate professor and the Jean-Loup Baer Professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington.