Rowan Zellers' Homepage

I'm a researcher at Thinking Machines, formerly OpenAI. I work on realtime multimodal across language, vision, and voice. My pronouns are he/his.

I have a blog I sometimes update. You can also find me on Twitter at @rown or Bluesky at @rowan.bsky.social.

Publications

For all papers, visit my Semantic Scholar or Google Scholar pages, or .

For more, visit my blog.

feb 2026 blog flow
February 22, 2026
I want to post more here. I redid the backend of my website to be lower friction.
My Summer 2022 Europe adventure: Berlin, Amsterdam, Split, Mostar, Sarajevo, Belgrade, Budapest, Vienna.
March 03, 2024
After grad school, I visited my sister in Berlin, then we went on an adventure in Central Europe and the Balkans.

I graduated with my PhD from the University of Washington in Computer Science and Engineering and was part time at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. I was advised by Yejin Choi and Ali Farhadi. I am super grateful for their mentorship.
During my PhD, I was supported by the NSF and ARCS Fellowships. Looking for tips on how to win the NSF fellowship? Check out my blog post here!
Prior to UW, I graduated from Harvey Mudd College in 2016, where I majored in Computer Science and Math.
As an undergrad, I worked with Louis-Philippe Morency on multimodal machine learning. My first research experience ever was with Jacqueline Dresch on computational biology.
Random things I like: rock climbing (especially bouldering!), running, biking, snowboarding, pottery, art+design, urbanism, jazz guitar, Dominion, onebag travel...
I have an Erdős number of 3 (Paul Erdős → Prasad Tetali → Sean Welleck → Me).