Professor Mihai Surdeanu named Fulbright U.S. Scholar
Through the Fulbright award, Dr. Surdeanu will expand his research collaborations internationally while contributing to academic exchange in Romania.
Dr. Mihai Surdeanu, a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Arizona, has been selected as a Fulbright U.S. Scholar for Romania for the 2026–2027 academic year.
The Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program, administered by the Institute of International Education, offers competitive fellowships for scholars to teach and conduct research abroad. The program is widely regarded as one of the most prestigious academic honors, with alumni including Nobel laureates, Pulitzer Prize winners, and MacArthur Fellows.
Dr. Mihai Surdeanu
At the University of Arizona, Surdeanu holds a primary appointment in Computer Science, with a courtesy appointment in Linguistics and Cognitive Science. His research focuses on developing systems that process and extract meaning from natural language text, an area within Natural Language Processing. His work includes question answering systems, information extraction, and interpretable machine learning models that can explain their decisions in human-understandable terms.
Surdeanu leads the Computational Language Understanding (CLU) Lab, an interdisciplinary research group that brings together faculty, students, and research programmers from computer science, linguistics, and information science. The lab develops advanced tools for analyzing language, including systems for semantic role labeling, discourse parsing, and extracting structured knowledge from unstructured text. These technologies have been applied in diverse domains, from biomedical research—such as identifying cancer signaling pathways—to automated systems that answer complex science exam questions.
Before joining the University of Arizona, Surdeanu served as a research scientist in the natural language processing group at Stanford University and as chief scientist at Lex Machina. He earned his PhD in computer science from Southern Methodist University.
Through the Fulbright award, Surdeanu is expected to expand his research collaborations internationally while contributing to academic exchange in Romania. His work abroad will not only advance his field but also strengthen ties between the University of Arizona and global research partners.
To learn more about Dr. Surdeanu and his research efforts, click here.