Russ Salakhutdinov earned his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Toronto under the supervision of Nobel Laureate Geoffrey Hinton. After completing a postdoctoral fellowship at MIT, he joined the University of Toronto before moving to Carnegie Mellon University. He also served as Director of AI Research at Apple and is currently the VP of Research at Meta. Russ's research focuses on deep learning, machine learning, and generative AI. He is an action editor for the Journal of Machine Learning Research and has served on the senior program committees of top-tier conferences, including NeurIPS, ICLR, and ICML. He was the program co-chair for ICML 2019 and the general chair for ICML 2024. He has published over 250 research papers and his work has received over 200,000 citations according to Google Scholar. He is an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow, Microsoft Research Faculty Fellow, a recipient of the Early Researcher Award, Google Faculty Award, and Nvidia's Pioneers of AI award.