I am an Associate Professor (Universitair Hoofddocent) at the University of Amsterdam, where I direct the AMLab, co-direct the UvA Bosch Delta Lab, and direct the Amsterdam ELLIS Unit.
My research develops principled methods for generative AI and probabilistic inference, with a focus on scalable and data-efficient scientific computation. This includes scalable neural architectures for physical systems, learned surrogate models, and deep generative models for molecular and materials design. An ongoing interest is variational flow matching, a probabilistic perspective on flow-based generative models that informs principled approaches to discrete and structured data, controlled generation, and test-time conditioning. I collaborate closely with experts in physical chemistry, fluid mechanics, and materials science.
Earlier in my career I worked extensively on probabilistic programming, the design of languages and inference algorithms that allow researchers to express complex probabilistic models as programs. This led to the development of Anglican, foundational work on inference methods for universal probabilistic programs, and a textbook.
Prior to joining the University of Amsterdam, I was an Assistant Professor at Northeastern University. I carried out my PhD research in biophysics at Leiden and Cambridge with Wim van Saarloos and Ray Goldstein, and held postdoctoral positions with Frank Wood at Oxford and with Chris Wiggins and Ruben Gonzalez at Columbia. I was a founding co-chair of the international conference on probabilistic programming (PROBPROG) and a program chair for AISTATS 2023.
Current Students and Postdocs
Alumni
- James Townsend (Postdoc, UvA) — Anthropic
- Heiko Zimmermann (Ph.D. 2025, UvA) — Research Scientist, Pasteur Labs
- Ondrej Bíža (Ph.D. 2024, Northeastern) — Research Scientist, RAI Institute
- Niklas Smedemark-Margulies (Ph.D. 2024, Northeastern) — Director of Bioinformatics Software Engineering, Variantyx
- Jered McInerney (Ph.D. 2024, Northeastern) — Data Scientist, CodaMetrix
- Eli Sennesh (Ph.D. 2023, Northeastern) — Postdoctoral Fellow, Vanderbilt University
- Hao Wu (Ph.D. 2023, Northeastern) — AWS
- Babak Esmaeili (Ph.D. 2023, UvA) — Postdoc, TU Eindhoven
- Robin Walters (Postdoc, Northeastern) — Assistant Professor, Northeastern University
- Silvio Amir (Postdoc, Northeastern) — Assistant Professor, Northeastern University
Recent Papers
A full list of publications can be found on Google Scholar.
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Purrception: Variational Flow Matching for Vector-Quantized Image Generation[ICLR] International Conference on Learning Representations, 2026Răzvan-Andrei Matişan, Vincent Tao Hu, Grigory Bartosh, Björn Ommer, Cees G. M. Snoek, Max Welling, Jan-Willem van de Meent, Mohammad Mahdi Derakhshani, Floor Eijkelboom
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Towards Reducing Diagnostic Errors with Interpretable Risk Prediction[NAACL] Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2024Denis Jered McInerney, William Dickinson, Lucy C. Flynn, Andrea C. Young, Geoffrey S. Young, Jan-Willem van de Meent, Byron C. Wallace
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That’s the Wrong Lung! Evaluating and Improving the Interpretability of Unsupervised Multimodal Encoders for Medical Data[EMNLP] Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 2022Denis Jered McInerney, Geoffrey Young, Jan-Willem van de Meent, Byron C. Wallace
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Interoception as modeling, allostasis as control[Bio. Psych.] Biological Psychology , 2022Eli Sennesh, Jordan Theriault, Dana Brooks, Jan-Willem van de Meent, Lisa Feldman Barrett, Karen S. Quigley
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Conjugate Energy-Based Models[ICML] International Conference on Machine Learning, 2021Hao Wu, Babak Esmaeili, Michael L. Wick, Jean-Baptiste Tristan, Jan-Willem van de Meent
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Nested Variational Inference[NeurIPS] Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 2021Heiko Zimmermann, Hao Wu, Babak Esmaeili, Jan-Willem van de Meent
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Learning Proposals for Probabilistic Programs with Inference Combinators[UAI] Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, 2021Sam Stites, Heiko Zimmermann, Hao Wu, Eli Sennesh, Jan-Willem van de Meent[PDF]
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Action Priors for Large Action Spaces in Robotics[AAMAS] International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, 2021Ondrej Biza, Jan-Willem van de Meent, Lawson Wong, Robert Platt
Selected Papers
Jan-Willem van de Meent
Associate Professor (UHD)
University of Amsterdam
Informatics Institute
Science Park 904, Room L4.13
+31 20 525 4605
