Ryan Welch

PhD Student at Stanford

About Me

I am a first year PhD student at Stanford University in the Computer Science Department. My research interests broadly lie in the advancement of AI-driven decision-making, and I actively work in the subjects of reinforcement learning, experimental design, and causal inference.

I previously graduated from MIT with a MEng in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering in 2025 and a Bachelor's in Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence in 2024. During this time, I had the pleasure of working with Professors Caroline Uhler and Aldo Pacchiano on the topics of causal representation learning and experimental design as an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center Scholar at the Broad Institute.

Publications

Identifiability Guarantees for Causal Disentanglement from Purely Observational Data.

Ryan Welch*, Jiaqi Zhang*, Caroline Uhler.

Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2024.

PDF Code

In-Context Learning Approach for Pure Exploration.

Alessio Russo*, Ryan Welch*, Aldo Pacchiano.

International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2026.

International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), EXAIT Workshop, 2025.

PDF Code

In-Context Learning for Pure Exploration in Continuous Spaces.

Alessio Russo, Yin-Ching Lee, Ryan Welch, Aldo Pacchiano.

ArXiv Preprint, 2026.

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HealthAdminBench: Evaluating Computer-Use Agents on Healthcare Administration Tasks.

Suhana Bedi*, Ryan Welch*, Ethan Steinberg*, Michael Wornow, Taeil Matthew Kim, Haroun Ahmed, Peter Sterling, Bravim Purohit, Qurat Akram, Angelic Acosta, Esther Nubla, Pritika Sharma, Michael A. Pfeffer, Sanmi Koyejo, Nigam H. Shah.

ArXiv Preprint, 2026.

International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), Agents in the Wild Workshop, 2026.

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Curriculum Vitae

You can download my full CV here.

Education

2025 - Present

PhD in Computer Science

Stanford University

2024 - 2025

MEng in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Thesis: Meta-Learning Exploration Strategies with Decision Transformers

2020 - 2024

BSc in Mathematics and in Artificial Intelligence and Decision Making