João Pedro Araújo is a PhD Advisor with InGenius Prep who brings one of the rarest assets in graduate admissions coaching: two years of direct experience sitting on the Stanford Computer Science PhD Admissions Committee, evaluating applications for one of the most selective PhD programs in the world. A Fulbright Fellow and PhD candidate in Computer Science at Stanford, João Pedro works with students targeting top PhD programs in computer science, artificial intelligence, robotics, and STEM disciplines, helping them build compelling research profiles, craft precise and persuasive statements of purpose, and understand exactly what elite admissions committees are looking for.
João Pedro’s commitment to teaching and mentorship is documented and exceptional. As a Course Assistant for Stanford’s CS234 (Reinforcement Learning) and CS161 (Design and Analysis of Algorithms), he was recognized in the top 5% of all Course Assistants university-wide, and co-authored a novel homework assignment on Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) that remains in active use at Stanford today. He has also directly supervised five Stanford undergraduate and graduate researchers on independent projects, several of which produced peer-reviewed publications at top venues. For students who want to enter graduate school with a real research track record, few advisors understand the full pipeline as clearly as João Pedro does.
His own research sits at the intersection of computer graphics and humanoid robotics, with a focus on character animation and physics simulation, conducted under Professor Karen Liu in Stanford’s Movement Lab. He has published at the field’s most competitive venues, including CVPR and ICRA (both CORE A*), with a Google Scholar H-Index of 8 and 381 citations. He developed GMR, an open-source motion retargeting library with over 2,400 GitHub stars, and serves as a peer reviewer for CVPR, ICRA, NeurIPS, and SIGGRAPH. He has completed research internships at Meta’s Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) group in Menlo Park and INRIA in Paris, and was selected as a Calouste Gulbenkian “New Talents” Fellow for research spanning group theory, quantum cryptography, and transfer learning.
Before joining Stanford, João Pedro completed a five-year Integrated Master’s in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Lisbon’s Instituto Superior Técnico, graduating with a GPA ranked in the top 0.2% of all students ever to complete the program. He received the APETRO Prize as the top-performing student across the entire five-year degree, the Professor Jaime Campos Ferreira Prize for academic excellence in mathematics, and First Prize in the European Union Contest for Young Scientists. He holds the Stanford “Enhancing Diversity in Graduate Education” (EDGE) Fellowship alongside his Fulbright.
