You step closer to the corkboard and pick up the placard. It reads: CHRISTOPHER Z. CUI 3rd-year PhD student, UC San Diego, PEARLS Lab. Advised by Dr. Prithviraj Ammanabrolu. Interests: LLM agents, reinforcement learning, monitorable reasoning, text environments, anything that helps AI systems collaborate with people instead of around them. This summer (Jun–Aug 2026): intern at Microsoft Research Montréal, working with Marc-Alexandre Côté and Xingdi "Eric" Yuan on agents in situated text environments. Before UCSD: M.S. at Georgia Tech (Drs. Thad Starner & Mark Riedl). Also served as Head Graduate TA for Dr. Thomas Ploetz — our research interests didn't end up aligning, but he was a mentor and friend who played a huge role in why I chose to pursue a PhD in the first place. Most of my current work is about reasoning that you can watch from the outside: making chain-of-thought monitorable and controllable, training agents that can recover from their own bad reasoning, and benchmarking what current LLMs can and can't do as agents in text environments. Boba preference: 50% sugar, less ice, taro pearls if available.