Learn more about the postdocs who are advancing their careers and contributing to a vibrant research community at the Allen School:
Nigini Abilio Oliveira
Nigini Abilio Oliveira is a postdoctoral research at the University of Washington's Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. Working with Professor Katharina Reinecke, he is searching to improve the user experience - for both researchers and volunteers - in the context of large-scale, volunteer-based online studies. Nigini has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Universidade Federal de Campina Grande in Brazil, where he worked with Nazareno Andrade on designing social Question & Answer sites that are equally engaging across global audiences. His research interest is in the broad Human-Computer Interaction area focusing on online collaboration, cross-cultural studies, open science, and community design.
Laura Arjona
Laura Arjona is a Research Associate in the Paul Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. She works in collaboration with Allen School and Electrical & Computer Engineering professor Joshua R. Smith and Rehabilitation Medicine professor Chet Moritz. Laura’s research focuses on high performance readers and protocols for backscatter-based neural implants. Laura believes that neural implants have the potential for significant impact in medicine, from restoring the use of limbs after spinal cord injury, to “electroceutical” alternatives to drugs, to brain-computer interfaces. Laura holds a doctoral degree from the University of Deusto in Bilbao, Spain. She received a master’s degree from UNED University in Madrid, Spain, and a bachelor’s degree in Telecommunications Engineering from the University of Granada, Spain.
Tapo Bhattacharjee
Tapomayukh "Tapo" Bhattacharjee is a postdoctoral research associate in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, working with Professor Siddhartha Srinivasa in the Personal Robotics Lab. He completed his Ph.D. in Robotics from Georgia Tech under the supervision of Professor Charlie Kemp. His primary research interests are in the fields of haptic perception, machine learning, manipulation and human-robot interaction. He believes in the potential of using multimodal haptic signals to enhance robot manipulation capabilities in unstructured environments as well as around humans. He aims to achieve this by inferring relevant properties of the world using physics-based and data-driven methods.
Maru Cabrera
Maria Eugenia (“Maru”) Cabrera is a postdoctoral research associate in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, working with professor Maya Cakmak in the Human-Centered Robotics Lab. She completed her Ph.D. from Purdue University under the supervision of Professor Juan Wachs. Her research interests include human robot interaction (HRI) and multimodal interactions based on embodiment, including gestures. More specifically, she wishes to conduct research in naturalistic and novel approaches to include cognitive and physiological aspects of human performance in collaborative tasks with other robots or other humans, either co-located or remotely.
Karthik Desingh
Karthik Desingh is a postdoctoral scholar in Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, working with Prof. Dieter Fox in the Robotics and State Estimation Lab. He completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Michigan under the supervision of Prof. Chad Jenkins. During his Ph.D. he was closely associated with Robotics Institute and Michigan AI. Desingh earned his B.E. in Electronics and Communication Engineering from Osmania University, India, and M.S. in Computer Science from IIIT-Hyderabad and Brown University. During his time in IIIT-Hyderabad, he worked in the Robotics Research Center headed by Prof. K Madhava Krishna and was co-advised by Prof. C V Jawahar from Center of Visual Information Technology (CVIT). His research interests lie primarily in perception for goal-driven mobile manipulation tasks. More specifically, he is interested in representations that can enable robots to perceive objects in the cluttered indoor environments for grasping and manipulation tasks.
Kameron Harris
Kameron Decker Harris is a postdoctoral research associate in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. He is analyzing human brain electrocorticography recordings in the labs of Allen School professor Rajesh Rao and Biology professor Bingni Brunton. His interests are in computational and theoretical neuroscience, in particular networks, dynamical systems, and data analysis. He earned his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from the University of Washington under Eric Shea-Brown. Prior to that, Kameron studied bus traffic optimization as a Fulbright Scholar in Chile, and his undergraduate and masters work at the University of Vermont included sentiment analysis of large-scale Twitter data.
Joseph Jaeger
Joseph Jaeger is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington's Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. He works with Professor Stefano Tessaro in the Cryptography Group. He primarily aims to use cryptography to find practical solutions to real-world security problems (though he can occasionally be found attempting to resolve questions of more theoretical interest). His research has included secure messaging, time-memory tradeoffs for the security of encryption, and security against mass surveillance. He received his Ph.D. in 2019 from the University of California, San Diego under the supervision of Professor Mihir Bellare.
Julian Katz-Samuels
Julian Katz-Samuels is a postdoctoral researcher working with Kevin Jamieson at the University of Washington. His research focuses on designing data-efficient algorithms for adaptive data collection with applications ranging from crowdsourcing to biological experiments. He received his Ph.D from the University of Michigan where he focused on settings in which the feedback and metrics of the experiment are multi-dimensional in nature.
Rik Koncel-Kedziorski
Rik Koncel-Kedziorski is a postdoctoral researcher in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington in Seattle, working with Noah Smith. His research is in machine learning techniques for document understanding and generation. He focuses on intertextuality for technical documents, language grounding, and question answering. In generation, he is learning to write coherent multi-sentence texts which meet specified content and style goals.
Weihao Kong
Weihao Kong is a postdoctoral researcher working with Sham Kakade. His research focuses on the information-theoretic side of machine learning, with the goal of developing efficient algorithms that extract accurate information from modest amounts of data under varies settings (e.g., high-dimensional, distributed, etc.). More broadly, his research interests span statistical learning, high-dimensional statistics, and theoretical computer science. He got his Ph.D. from the Computer Science Department at Stanford University advised by Gregory Valiant. He received his B.S. from Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
Kendall Lowrey
Kendall Lowrey is a postdoctoral researcher working with Sham Kakade. His interests are at the intersection of intelligent control and machine learning for robotics applications. Recent work attempts to use complexity as an invariant to automatically discover abstractions in complex dynamics. He received his PhD from UW under Emo Todorov in 2019, and an BS from Carnegie Mellon University in 2010.
Christoforos Mavrogiannis
Christoforos (Chris) Mavrogiannis is a postdoctoral research associate in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, working with Prof. Siddhartha Srinivasa and the Personal Robotics Lab. He is broadly interested in the algorithmic foundations of robotics, with a particular emphasis on the design of efficient, safe and robust motion planning algorithms for robot navigation, multi-robot manipulation and human-robot interaction applications. He is passionate about enabling robots to integrate seamlessly in human environments. Chris earned his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Cornell University, under the supervision of Prof. Ross A. Knepper. Prior to that, he received a diploma in Mechanical Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens.
Joseph McMahan
Joseph McMahan is a postdoctoral researcher at the Paul Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, working with the SAMPL group on deep learning research. His current work there deals with connecting the rapidly-changing demands of machine learning models with agile hardware support to enable faster and more dynamic ML development and research. His previous research has been at the intersection of computer architecture, formal methods, and security. He received his Ph.D. from UC Santa Barbara in computer architecture, but decided to leave the simulated reality of Santa Barbara because it had too much sunshine; his life-long coffee addiction meant that Seattle was the next logical destination. He enjoys books, games, and music, and built his own 3D printer from scratch. He holds a B.A. in physics from Princeton University.
Keisuke Motone
Keisuke Motone is a postdoctoral scholar working with Jeff Nivala at the Molecular Information Systems Lab (MISL). His research focuses on developing chemical and computational approaches to decoding biological information stored within protein and peptide sequences with nanopore sensor technology. He completed his Ph.D. in Applied Life Sciences at Kyoto University in Japan.
Peter Ney
Peter Ney is a Research Associate in the Paul Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington where he is a member of both the Security and Privacy Lab and the Molecular Information Systems Lab. His research is focused on understanding computer security risks in emerging technologies like DNA synthesis and sequencing and on developing technologies to detect and measure cell phone surveillance. He is fascinated by the intersection between technology, policy, and law and is a member of the UW Tech Policy Lab. Before arriving at UW, he obtained his bachelor's at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he studied Computer Science, Molecular Biology, and Mathematics and researched the evolution of development in the Carroll Lab.
Nikolaos Pappas
Nikolaos Pappas is a postdoctoral researcher in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington working with professor Noah Smith. Nikos is interested in creating unified, structure-aware, and sample efficient models of natural language. Previously, he did a postdoc with doctor James Henderson at the Idiap Research Institute's natural language understanding group and earned his doctoral degree in Electrical Engineering at EPFL with professors Andrei Popescu-Belis and Hervé Bourlard.
Adam Richie-Halford
Adam Richie-Halford is a data science postdoctoral fellow in the University of Washington's eScience Institute. Working with Professor Ariel Rokem, he is developing statistical learning techniques and software for the analysis of neuroimaging data. He earned a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Washington, where he worked with Aurel Bulgac to develop quantum Monte Carlo simulations for systems encountered in nuclear many-body theory. Adam's current research interests lie in extracting the biophysical properties of the brain's major white matter connections by leveraging large open datasets
containing diffusion MRI images. He is also develops open-source software tools to enable other neuroscientists to analyze and share large datasets. Adam is a member of the Software and Data Carpentry communities and cares about open-science and reproducibility.
Maximilian Schleich
Maximilian Schleich is a postdoctoral scholar in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, where he works with Dan Suciu. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Oxford, under the supervision of Dan Olteanu. His research lies at the interface of databases and machine learning. In particular, he investigates how the learning of models can be improved by exploiting the structure and semantics of the underlying database.
Alex Takakuwa
Alex Takakuwa is a postdoctoral research associate in the Paul Allen School for Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington working in the Security and Privacy Lab with Tadayoshi Kohno. He received his bachelor's degree in mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania.
Chun Zhao
Chun Zhao is a postdoctoral research associate in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington, working with Professor Michael Taylor in the Bespoke Silicon Group. His primary research interests are in the fields of computer architecture, digital integrated circuits, system on chip and embedded systems. His current research focuses on RISC-V based open source microprocessors and peripheral interfaces, with an emphasis on the design and implementation of memory controller and PHY IPs. Chun received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from University of Chinese Academy of Sciences. He received his B.E. from Harbin Institute of Technology.
Haisen Zhao
Haisen Zhao is a postdoctoral research associate in CSE at the University of Washington. He is a member of the Computer Graphics Group (GRAIL), working with Adriana Schulz. His research interest lies at the geometric processing and its application for digital fabrication, including additive manufacturing and subtractive manufacturing. He completed his Ph.D. from Shandong University (2018) under the supervision of Baoquan Chen and received Master's and Bachelor's degree in School of Computer Science and Technology and School of Software at Shandong University in 2014 and 2011, respectively.