Maria Leonor Pacheco

About Me

I am an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Colorado Boulder, where I lead the Boulder Language and Social Technologies research group. I am also a Faculty Fellow at CU’s Institute of Cognitive Science.

Before joining CU, I was a Postdoctoral Researcher at Microsoft Research NYC. I completed my PhD in Computer Science at Purdue University, and my BSc. in Computer Science and Engineering at the Universidad Simon Bolivar in Caracas, Venezuela, where I was born and raised.

I am not recruiting PhD students for Fall 2025.

My Work

I primarily work on Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning and Computational Social Science. I am mostly interested in the integration of structured knowledge and statistical models, and in the relationship between language and social systems. I am a strong believer in interdisciplinary, collaborative work. I actively collaborate with researchers in linguistics, human-computer interaction, formal methods, security, bioinformatics, and the behavioral and social sciences. For more information, see my full list of publications.

Interested in working with me?

• If you are a student at CU come talk to me about your research interests and ideas!
• If you are prospective PhD student please apply to CU and mention my name in your application. I will carefully consider all applications of prospective students interested in working with me. However, I might not be able to reply to all prospective students email. For more thoughts on this, I recommend Prof. Yonatan Bisk’s notes on cold emailing professors.
• I do not have positions available for students outside of CU.