Durk Kingma

Career

1. 
   Anthropic

   • ML ResearchOct 2024 – present
2. 
   Google

   • Research Scientist, Google Brain / DeepMindJul 2018 – Oct 2024
3. 
   OpenAI

   • Research Scientist and Team LeadDec 2015 – Jul 2018
4. 
   Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences

   • Research Scholar2012–2013
   • Jr. Research ScientistMay 2009 – Dec 2009
5. A
   Advanza

   • Co-FounderFeb 2009 – 2012

Education

• Ph.D., Machine Learning, University of Amsterdam, 2013-2017
• M.Sc., Computer Science (Theoretical Computer Science), Universiteit Utrecht, 2007-2009
• Computer Science (visiting student), Sapienza Università di Roma, 2006-2007
• B.Sc., Computer Science, Universiteit Utrecht, 2002-2007

Lesser-known facts

• Goes by the Frisian nickname Durk; his formal name is Diederik.
• Won ICLR Test of Time awards for the VAE (2024) and Adam (2025) papers.
• Was an early OpenAI research scientist before Google Brain.
• Co-founded Advanza and was its technical lead from 2010 to 2012; the company had a successful exit in 2016.
• Worked as a junior research scientist in Yann LeCun's lab at NYU in 2009 and 2012.
• Earned his PhD cum laude, the first such distinction in the University of Amsterdam's computer science department in 30 years.
• Led OpenAI's Algorithms team, focused on basic research, as part of its founding team from 2015 to 2018.
• The Adam paper alone has more than 266,000 citations on Google Scholar.
• Urged people not to support the AI anti-regulation lobby, arguing some AI uses are net negative unless well regulated.

Known for

• Variational Autoencoder (VAE)
• Adam optimizer
• Glow
• Variational Diffusion Models

Honors

2025: ICLR 2025 Test of Time Award for Adam optimizer paper · 2024: ICLR 2024 Test of Time Award for VAE paper · 2019: Dutch Datascience Award · 2019: ELLIS PhD Award · 2015: Google's first European Doctoral Fellowship in Deep Learning

Interviews and talks

• ICLR 2025 Test of Time talk on Adam, with Jimmy Ba (2025)x.com