Type of position: post-doc, teaching position, research position, senior research fellow, research engineer in academia, research engineer in industry, other positions in industry
Name: Alican Mertan
Description:
I am looking for postdoctoral, research, and teaching positions in academia, as well as research roles in industry, where my combination of optimization, machine learning, and embodied AI expertise can be applied to new problems. My interests span evolutionary optimization, embodied intelligence, and the application of evolutionary methods to modern AI systems such as LLMs and multi-agent systems. My work has ranged from analyzing the inner workings of these methods to applying them to practical problems, and I am glad to continue in either direction. I am happy to relocate and available to start immediately.
Short CV:
I completed my PhD in Computer Science at the University of Vermont in May 2026, working at the intersection of evolutionary computation, deep learning, and artificial life; I hold an MSc and a BSc in Computer Engineering from Istanbul Technical University. My dissertation studied the evolutionary co-design of morphology and control in embodied agents: I characterized why brain–body co-optimization consistently fails to select for morphological potential and developed methods that mitigate this, including generalist controllers trained with quality-diversity and knowledge distillation. Before my PhD, I worked on computer vision and machine learning, formulating relative depth estimation as a ranking problem and developing generally applicable calibrated multi-label ranking methods. My research has also had a strong multidisciplinary side, with collaborations ranging from point-cloud modeling of historical buildings with architects to agent-based modeling of land use with urban planners. Across these areas I have authored 17 publications, including first-authored papers at GECCO, ALIFE, and EuroGP, as well as work at 3DV and ECAI and in journals such as Digital Signal Processing and Computers & Graphics.
Email: alican.mertan@pm.me
ORCID:
Web page: mertan-a.xyz
Other link: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=UDZxnUwAAAAJ&hl=en
General location: North America
Specific countries: United States
Until when: 2027-02-01
Present at next GECCO? no