Skyler Hallinan is a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the University of Southern California where he is advised by Sai Praneeth Karimireddy and Xiang Ren. His research aims to build autonomous AI systems capable of complex, long-horizon reasoning, even in unfamiliar environments. He achieves this by shaping their reasoning process: understanding why they fail, then curating better training experiences and inference strategies. Previously, he was a research intern at Microsoft Research, Samaya AI, Apple, and Amazon, and received a B.S./M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Washington, where he was advised by Yejin Choi. His work has been covered by Science magazine and has received spotlight and oral awards at NeurIPS and ICLR.