George Montañez, Ph.D.

Dr. George D. Montañez, MSCS '11, is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at Harvey Mudd College, in Claremont, California. He is a former data scientist with Microsoft AI+Research. Montañez obtained a Ph.D. in machine learning from Carnegie Mellon University, with additional degrees in computer science (B.S., University of California Riverside; M.S., Baylor University) and machine learning (M.S., Carnegie Mellon University). His work sits at the intersection of machine learning and information theory. He is a former NSF Graduate Research Fellow and Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellow. His work has been presented at conferences such as AAAI, IEEE CEC, and ICAART, including a best paper award at CIKM 2014, best student paper award at IEEE SMC 2017, best student paper award at IJCNN 2017, and best paper award at ICAART 2020. Montañez has interned at Microsoft Research, Yahoo!, and Bing, and given invited talks at Meta, Microsoft, General Electric and research institutions across the U.S. He has written on topics including applied machine learning, biological complexity, and the ethics of AI. Montañez is a Visiting Fellow at the University of Cambridge (Clare Hall) during the 2025-2026 academic year.