By Julia Schwarz
Victoria Dean has joined Princeton as a teaching faculty member in computer science, bringing expertise in machine learning and robotics. She started July 1, 2025.
Dean was previously an assistant professor of computer science at Olin College of Engineering.
While her research interests focus on robotics and machine learning, her passion, she said, is teaching. “I love getting to work with undergrads.”
This semester, Dean is co-teaching Introduction to Machine Learning with Adji Bousso Dieng and Ruth Fong. She is already collaborating with two students: an undergraduate who is developing a chatbot to help course participants navigate materials, and a master’s student developing an LLM to help instructors provide useful feedback on assignments.
“I’m really excited to be at a liberal arts university,” Dean said. “I'm excited about working with students who have diverse interests and want to look at machine learning through different lenses.”
At Olin, Dean combined teaching with her research interests through an innovative course where the students used machine learning tools to analyze data from campus heating and cooling systems. The course, offered in collaboration with campus operations, yielded useful insights into how to make buildings operate more efficiently.
“People don't necessarily look at a building and think that it's a robot,” Dean said. “But it definitely is.” Buildings have “many aspects of perception and control,” she said, such as temperature sensors and boilers.
While robots are working all around us, teaching robotics is restricted to a small number of select universities, another challenge Dean has worked on during her career. “Robots are very expensive,” she said. “They're very finicky and hard to get set up. There's a lot of infrastructure involved.”
As a doctoral student in Carnegie Mellon, Dean helped create a program to help broaden access to research tools. She and her collaborators collected data from the robotics environment at CMU and created an open-source benchmark that students from anywhere in the world could use, allowing them to test their methods on state-of-the-art equipment.
Dean’s commitment to helping her community is longstanding. As an undergraduate at MIT, she helped co-create Code for Good, a group that pairs students with local non-profit organizations to provide free technical support.
The group has been operational for 10 years and helped over sixty non-profits. “It was a really fun way to connect students more with the local community and better understand their problems,” said Dean.