People

Outgoing Ph.D.s & Postdocs

Outgoing Postdocs

Vinay Koshy

Vinay’s professional website
Advisor(s): Amy X. Zhang
Research area: Human-Computer Interaction, Natural Language Processing, Human-Centered AI
Research emphasis: Building and evaluating human-AI systems for subjective, ambiguous, and under-defined tasks. Additional computational social science work studying online community dynamics.
Employment preference: Academia – Tenure Track Faculty

Jesse Zhang

Jesse’s professional website
Advisor(s): Dieter Fox, Abhishek Gupta
Research area: Robotics, Reinforcement Learning
Research emphasis: Building pre-training, supervision, and post-training algorithms that make it feasible to make robots efficiently adapt in real world.
Employment preference: Academia – Tenure Track Faculty, Industry – Research, Industry – Development

Mo Zhou

Mo’s professional website
Advisor(s): Simon Du, Maryam Fazel
Research area: AI, ML, Optimization
Research emphasis: Mathematical foundations of modern machine learning, with a focus on optimization and learning dynamics in large overparameterized models.
Employment preference: Academia – Tenure Track Faculty, Industry – Research, Industry – Development

Outgoing Ph.D. Students

Emmanuel Azuh Mensah

Emmanuel’s professional website
Advisor(s): Kurtis Heimerl
Research area: Computer Vision, Efficient On-Device ML, Representation Learning
Dissertation topic: Adaptive, Efficient, and Context-Aware Vision for Edge Deployment
Employment preference: Industry – Research, Industry – Development

Yael Eiger

Yael’s professional website
Advisor(s): Franziska Roesner
Research area: Security/Privacy
Employment preference: Academia – Postdoc

Shangbin Feng

Shangbin’s professional website
Advisor(s): Yulia Tsvetkov
Research area: Machine Learning, Large Language Models
Dissertation topic: Model Collaboration, For A Bottom-Up and Participatory AI Future
Employment preference:Academia – Tenure Track Faculty, Industry – Research

Madeleine Grunde-McLaughlin

Madeline’s professional website
Advisor(s): Jeffrey Heer and Daniel Weld
Research area: Human-AI Interaction
Dissertation topic: Surfacing Alternatives to Support Human Oversight of Agentic AI Systems
Employment preference: Academia – Postdoc, Industry – Research

Gregor Haas

Gregor’s professional website
Advisor(s): David Kohlbrenner
Research area: Hardware Security
Dissertation topic: Hacking Transistors: Data Remanence Attacks via BTI-based Side Channel Analysis
Employment preference: Industry – Research, Industry – Development

Tyler Han

Tyler’s professional website
Advisor(s): Byron Boots
Research area: Robot Learning, Inverse Reinforcement Learning (RL), Model Predictive Control
Dissertation topic: If You Love Your Robot: Minimizing Supervision Toward Real-World Robot Learning
Employment preference: Academia – Tenure Track Faculty, Academia – Postdoc, Industry – Research

Rachel Hong

Rachel’s professional website
Advisor(s): Tadayoshi Kohno and Jamie Morgenstern
Research area: Responsible AI
Dissertation topic: AI entanglement: Unveiling legal and societal implications of model dependencies in AI development supply chains
Employment preference: Government / Civil Society

Sanghun Jung

Sanghun’s professional website
Advisor(s): Byron Boots
Research area: Robotics, Computer Vision, Autonomous Vehicles
Dissertation topic: Generalizable and Fast Adaptable Robotic Perception Algorithms in Unstructured, Complex Environments
Employment preference: Industry – Research

Chanwoo Kim

Chanwoo’s professional website
Advisor(s): Su-In Lee
Research area: Biomedical AI, Transparent ML
Dissertation topic: Transparent and Steerable Biomedical AI: From Model Auditing to Scientific Discovery
Employment preference: Academia – Tenure Track Faculty, Industry – Research

Aaleyah Lewis

Aaleyah’s professional website
Advisor(s): James Fogarty & Jennifer Mankoff
Research area: Accessibility, Human-Computer Interaction, Responsible AI
Dissertation topic: Context-Sensitive Access: Intersectional Approaches to Understanding, Designing, and Computationally Evaluating AI-Mediated Accessibility
Employment preference: Academia – Postdoc, Industry – Research

Chu Li

Chu’s professional website
Advisor(s): Jon E. Froehlich
Research area: Human-computer Interaction
Dissertation topic: Towards Personalized Urban Navigation for People with Diverse Abilities
Employment preference: Academia – Tenure Track Faculty

Margaret Li

Margaret’s professional website
Advisor(s): Luke Zettlemoyer
Research area: NLP
Employment preference: Academia – Tenure Track Faculty, Academia – Postdoc, Industry – Research

Siting Li

Siting’s professional website
Advisor(s): Simon S. Du
Research area: Multimodal models
Employment preference: Industry – Research

Jingwei Ma

Jingwei’s professional website
Advisor(s): Steve Seitz, Brian Curless, and Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman
Research area: Computer Vision, Generative AI, Video Generation
Employment preference: Industry – Research, Industry – Development

Marius Memmel

Marius’ professional website
Advisor(s): Abhishek Gupta, Dieter Fox
Research area: Robot Learning, Meta learning, Reinforcement learning
Dissertation topic: Learning how to adapt: from sparse to rich feedback
Employment preference: Industry – Research

Roy Or-El

Roy’s professional website
Advisor(s): Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman
Research area: Computer Vision, Generative AI
Dissertation topic: Generative AI
Employment preference: Industry – Research

Chandler Petersen

Chandler’s professional website
Advisor(s): Georg Seelig
Research area: DNA Computing & Molecular Programming
Dissertation topic: Large-Scale Integration of DNA Logic Gates
Employment preference: Academia – Postdoc, Industry – Research

Reza Salehi

Reza’s professional website
Advisor(s): Ali Farhadi
Research area: Deep learning, LLMs, multimodal models
Employment preference: Industry – Research, Industry – Development

Anna Spiro

Anna’s professional website
Advisor(s): Sara Mostafavi
Research area: Computational Biology
Dissertation topic: Toward decoding personal genomes with sequence-to-function models
Employment preference: Academia – Tenure Track Faculty, Academia – Teaching Faculty, Academia – Postdoc, Industry – Research

Leijie Wang

Leijie’s professional website
Advisor(s): Amy X. Zhang
Research area: HCI
Dissertation topic: End Users in the Loop: Support Iterative Personalization for Everyday Algorithmic Systems
Employment preference: Academia – Tenure Track Faculty, Industry – Research

Xinqi Wang

Xinqi’s professional website
Advisor(s): Simon S. Du
Research area: Reinforcement learning, NLP
Dissertation topic: Pbtbench: testing LLM’s ability in understanding and writing semantic-based tests
Employment preference: Industry – Research, Industry – Development

Michael Whitmeyer

Michael’s professional website
Advisor(s): Paul Beame
Research area: Theory, Complexity
Dissertation topic: Collision-finding and Time-Space Tradeoffs
Employment preference: Academia – Tenure Track Faculty, Academia – Teaching Faculty, Academia – Postdoc

Patrick Yin

Patrick’s professional website
Advisor(s): Abhishek Gupta
Research area: Robotics, Reinforcement Learning
Employment preference: Industry – Research, Industry – Development

Mingyuan Zhong

Mingyuan’s professional website
Advisor(s): James Fogarty, Jacob Wobbrock
Research area: Human-AI Interaction, Accessibility
Dissertation topic: AI-Driven Understanding and Enhancement of Interface Accessibility
Employment preference: Academia – Tenure Track Faculty, Industry – Research, Industry – Development