David Abel

Current Students

Samuel Garcin Co-advised with Chris Lucas

Ben Sanati Co-advised with Amos Storkey

Massimiliano Tamborski Co-advised with Rika Antonova

Alumni

1. Massimiliano Tamborski, Masters student, UoE, 2025.
2. Alper Demir, Post-doc, UoE, 2025.

Other Recent Student Collaborators

• Kale-ab Tessera, UoE.
• Elle Miller, UoE.
• Bálint Gyevnár, UoE.
• Riccardo Zamboni, Politecnico di Milano.
• Raul Steleac, UoE.
• Trevor McInroe, UoE.
• Nishanth Anand, Mila.
• Yue Guo, CMU.
• Hyunin Lee, UC Berkeley.
• Jee Won Park, Brown.
• Andi Peng, MIT, now at Anthropic.
• Nate Rahn, Mila.

Prospective Students

In the next year or two I will be looking to recruit one PhD student at the University of Edinburgh to work on the foundations of agency. More information about the program and funding sources is available here, as well as two relevant CDTs in ML Systems and Robotics. If you are interested in working with me, please send me an email at david.abel@ed.ac.uk with the following:

• Your CV.
• A few sentences describing (1) your research interests and (2) and why you want to work with me specifically.
• Read one of the following papers, mention which you have read in your email, and include one question you have about the paper:
1. Plasticity as the Mirror of Empowerment
2. A Definition of Continual Reinforcement Learning
3. On the Expressivity of Markov Reward
4. Settling the Reward Hypothesis
5. On the Convergence of Bounded Agents

• I am especially looking for students that want to deep conceptual work. The main thing I am looking for in prospective students is the capacity to do deep conceptual work.
• I am part-time at UoE as an Honorary Fellow. This means I can only be a secondary supervisor, and any students I take on will be co-advised with a full-time professor at the University. There are many fantastic professors at UoE---see my current students for folks I presently co-supervise with.
• I care deeply about my students, and will always make time for them. Since I am part-time, this means that I cannot take more than around three students at once to respect their time. One student is expected to graduate 2026, so I will be recruiting one student to start either 2026 or 2027.

Letters of Recommendation

• Advance notice: Please ask me for a letter at least one month before the first deadline you would like me to meet (in exceptional cases, I may be able to write a letter on short notice).
• An up to date CV.
• A reminder one week before the deadline (if I have not confirmed that I've already submitted the letter).

Resources for Students