Dr. William Merrill

Assistant Professor (starting Fall 2026)

PhD - New York University

Will Merrill is currently a Young Investigator at the Allen Institute for AI and an incoming Assistant Professor at the Toyota Technical Institute at Chicago. He previously received his PhD from New York University.

A major focus of Will’s research has been developing theory on the computational power and limitations of transformers, with an eye towards understanding how transformer language models represent linguistic structure and solve reasoning problems. More generally, he is interested in theoretical computer science, computational linguistics, and the theory of deep learning, having worked on understanding the foundations of distributional semantics and the science of language model pretraining.

Dr. Merrill also has a personally maintained website which can be found at http://www.ttic.edu/merrill.