By Rachel Robey
In May, the Department of Computer Sciences celebrated spring commencement—by all accounts, one of the best in campus history. At the PhD graduation ceremony on May 9, 23 CS students walked across the stage toward their futures, finally becoming alumni after (on average) five to seven years of rigorous research and study. Now off to begin careers in academia and industry, commencement was a rare opportunity to reflect on all their hard work and accomplishments.
“These moments are a reminder of how much support it takes to get through a PhD, and how much the achievement means not just to the student but to everyone around them,” said Professor Bilge Mutlu, who graduated three students this year, in a LinkedIn post. “The PhD graduates from UW–Madison Computer Sciences are truly exceptional, each tackling deep technical and social challenges and producing ideas that reshape research, industry, and society. They leave here not only as scholars but as changemakers.”
Below, we celebrate the 33 students who defended their dissertations in the last year and officially added “PhD” to their CVs.
Doctoral students who defended between June 2024 and May 2025:
Saurabh Agarwal
Dissertation: Reducing synchronization overheads in Machine Learning systems
Co-advisors: Shivaram Venkataraman and Dimitris Papailiopoulos
Awards: Machine Learning and Systems Rising Star, NAACL SAC Award
Current position: Postdoc at UT-Austin
Edward Barton
Dissertation: Practical Single Shot High Dynamic Range Imaging
Advisor: Yu Hen Hu
Bengisu Çağıltay
Dissertation: Designing Social Robots for Everyday Family Life
Advisor: Bilge Mutlu
Awards: Best Short Paper Award (ACM IDC), Best Paper Honorable Mention (ACM CHI)
Current position: On the job market for faculty and postdoctoral positions.
Mu Cai
Dissertation: Toward Versatile and Efficient Multimodal Models
Advisor: Yong Jae Lee
Awards: Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship Finalist (2024), UW Conference Presentation Award (2024), UW CS Summer Research Award (2021)
Current position: Research Scientist at Google DeepMind
Xufeng Cai
Dissertation: Towards Efficient Optimization for Decomposable Problems in Large-Scale Machine Learning
Advisor: Jelena Diakonikolas
Joseph Catudal
Dissertation: Practical Environmental Sensing On Optical Communication Infrastructure
Advisor: Paul Barford
Current position: Research Team Lead, Academy Professor of the Army Cyber Institute at United States Military Academy
Xuefeng Du
Dissertation: Foundations of Unknown-aware Machine Learning
Advisor: Sharon Li
Awards: Jane Street Graduate Research Fellowship, Ivanisevic Award (2025)
Current position: Assistant Professor at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Ying Fan
Dissertation: Sequential Learning for Foundation Models: Reinforcement Learning for Diffusion Models and Looped Transformers
Advisor: Kangwook Lee
Award: Rising Star in Machine Learning
Current position: Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research
Kevin Gaffney
Dissertation: Bridging the Processor-Memory Performance Gap in Database Systems
Advisor: Jignesh Patel
Bhavya Goyal
Dissertation: Robust Scene Inference under Adverse Conditions
Advisor: Mohit Gupta
Current position: Applied Scientist at Amazon Robotics
Ashish Hooda
Dissertation: Security of Real World Machine Learning Systems
Co-advisors: Kassem Fawaz and Somesh Jha
Mazharul Islam
Dissertation: Safeguarding online authentication systems from attacks
Advisor: Rahul Chatterjee
Awards: Ce-an Zuo and Chao-ming Wang Scholar (2024)
Current position: Security Engineer II at Uber
Sacha Jungerman
Dissertation: Spatial Computing from Photons
Advisor: Mohit Gupta
Rishabh Khandelwal
Dissertation: Assessing and Enhancing Users’ Online Data Privacy
Advisor: Kassem Fawaz
Cheuk Yin (Eric) Lin
Dissertation: Faster Coordinate Algorithms for Structured Machine Learning Problems
Advisor: Jelena Diakonikolas
Current position: Research Scientist at Meta
Ziqian Lin
Dissertation: Understanding In-Context Learning via Synthetic and Controllable Datasets
Advisor: Kangwook Lee
Jing Liu
Dissertation: Scale, Performance, and Fault-Tolerance in a Filesystem Semi-Microkernel
Co-advisors: Andrea and Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau
Awards: Best Paper (2025 USENIX), Erik Riedel Best Paper Award (FAST ’25), Meta PhD Fellowship (2022)
Current position: Senior researcher at Microsoft
Anna Meyer
Dissertation: Robustness to Multiplicity in the Machine Learning Pipeline
Co-advisors: Aws Albargouthi and Loris D’Antoni
Awards: WISCIENCE STEM Public Service Fellow
Current position: Assistant Professor at Carleton College
Elena Milkai
Dissertation: Real-Time Analytics On Cloud Database Systems
Co-advisors: Jignesh Patel and Xiangyao Yu
Shyam Murthy
Dissertation: Instruction Presending
Advisor: Gurindar Sohi
Eric Pauley
Dissertation: Methods and Applications for Cloud-based Internet Measurement
Advisor: Patrick McDaniel
Awards: Outstanding Graduate Student Research Award (2024), Best Paper Runner‑Up (ACM IMC 2023), Top Program Committee Member (2025 IEEE SP 2025)
Current position: Assistant Professor at Virginia Tech, Co-Founder/CEO of DScope Security
Martin Prammer
Dissertation: Towards Architecture-Aware Data Analytics
Advisor: Jignesh Patel
Awards: Program Committee Member (ACM SIGMOD, VLDB 2026), Session Chair (CIDR 2025)
Current position: Postdoc at Carnegie Mellon
Anthony Lawrence George Rebello
Dissertation: Correctness and Performance with Declarative System Calls
Co-advisors: Andrea and Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau
Awards: Invited to publish an extended version in the ACM Transactions on Storage
Current position: Platforms Infrastructure Engineer at Google
Nicollas Mocelin Sdroievski
Dissertation: Derandomization vs. Lower Bounds for Arthur-Merlin Protocols
Advisor: Dieter Van Melkebeek
Awards: UW CS Graduate Instructor Award (2022)
Current position: Assistant Professor at the State University of Paraná in Brazil
Zhenmei Shi
Dissertation: Understanding Training and Adaptation in Feature Learning: From Two-layer Networks to Foundation Models
Advisor: Yingyu Liang
Current position: Senior research scientist at MongoDB
Laura Margaret Stegner
Dissertation: Toward Integrating Care Robots into Senior Living Facilities
Advisor: Bilge Mutlu
Awards: NSF Graduate Research Fellow, Heidelberg Laureate Forum Young Researcher, Cisco Distinguished Graduate Fellow
Current position: Assistant Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at George Washington University
Yuxin Sun
Dissertation: Algorithms and Information-Computation Trade-offs in High-Dimensional Statistical Estimation
Advisor: Ilias Diakonikolas
Current position: Postdoc at Aarhus University
Harit Vishwakarma
Dissertation: Towards Reliable Machine Learning: From Data to Deployment
Co-advisors: Frederic Sala and Ramya Vinayak
Roger Waleffe
Dissertation: Algorithms and Systems for Scalable Machine Learning over Graphs
Advisor: Steve Wright
Qisi Wang
Dissertation: Extending Projective Dynamics for Practical and Efficient Simulation
Advisor: Eftychios Sifkis
Nathan White
Dissertation: Improving Human-Robot Collaboration through Abstraction and Scaffolding in Planning and Programming Interfaces
Advisor: Bilge Mutlu
Hangdong Zhao
Dissertation: Advancing Join Algorithms for Real-World Queries
Advisor: Paris Koutris
Awards: ACM Best Paper Award, ACM Distinguished Paper Awards, Outstanding Graduate Student Research Award (2025)
Current position: Senior Applied Scientist at Microsoft
Yunjia Zhang
Dissertation: Machine Learning for Data Analytics: Profiling, Querying, and Beyond
Co-advisors: Jignesh Patel and Theodoros Rekatsinas
Congratulations to the 2024-2025 PhD students!