Chris Maddison is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and the Department of Statistical Sciences at the University of Toronto. He is a CIFAR AI Chair at the Vector Institute, a research scientist at DeepMind, a member of the ELLIS Society, and a faculty affiliate of the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society. Previously, he was a member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ from 2019–2020, and he completed his DPhil at the University of Oxford. Maddison was an Open Philanthropy AI Fellow during his graduate studies, and he received a NeurIPS Best Paper Award in 2014. Maddison works on the methodology of machine learning with the goal of designing algorithms that can take advantage of the natural structure of data, such as evolutionary relationships between proteins, to learn more efficiently from examples. Maddison developed gradient estimation techniques that are now standard tools in the deep learning toolbox, and he was a founding member of the AlphaGo project, which was the first computer program to defeat a world champion in the game of Go.