Volodymyr Kuleshov

Volodymyr Kuleshov is an Assistant Professor at Cornell Tech and Cornell University's Department of Computer Science. His research focuses on machine learning, particularly generative models, probabilistic methods, and applications in health and sustainability. He co-founded Afresh, an AI startup reducing food waste, and has commercialized genome sequencing work via Moleculo (now part of Illumina). Kuleshov earned his PhD from Stanford University, advised by prominent figures like Stefano Ermon and Serafim Batzoglou. He teaches courses like CS 5785 (Applied Machine Learning) and CS 6785 (Advanced Topics in Machine Learning). His awards include the NSF CAREER Award and Arthur Samuel Best Thesis Award.

Education: PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University (2018), advised by Stefano Ermon, Serafim Batzoglou, Michael Snyder, Christopher Re, and Percy Liang.

Research Interests: Core ML (generative models, approximate inference), health tech (genome sequencing, clinical decision support), sustainability (AI-driven food waste reduction). Notable projects include Caduceus for DNA sequence modeling and Diffusion Duality theory.

Awards: Google Research Scholar Award (2025), Outstanding Paper Award (EMNLP 2023), NIH MIRA Award (2023).

Students/Advising: Over 20 advisees across PhD, Master’s, and undergraduate programs, including Edgar Marroquin (PhD) and Charlie Marx (Stanford). Alumni include Allan Bishop (Bloomberg) and Yong Huang (UCI PhD).

Labs/Teams: Leads research groups at Cornell Tech focusing on generative AI and its real-world applications. Collaborates with institutions like MILA (Montreal) and DeepMind.