Celebrating Computer Sciences’s 2025-26 PhD students
On May 8, 2026, graduating PhD students walked across the floor in the Hello, World classroom in Morgridge Hall and received their hoods as the culmination of their graduate careers. Now they are alumni and headed to careers in fields that vary from industry to academia.
Computer Sciences Chair Paul Barford noted that this was the first graduation celebration to be hosted in Morgridge Hall. “The event honored years of dedication and hard work,” he said, continuing, “As these graduates embark on the next chapter of their lives—tackling new challenges and making meaningful contributions to the world—we wish them the very best and hope they will keep in touch.”
Below we celebrate the accomplishment of the 53 PhD students who defended their dissertations between June 2025 and May 2026. Congratulations, all!
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Dyah Adila
Dissertation: Representation-Centric Approaches to Foundation Model Adaptation
Advisor: Frederic Sala
Awards: NeurIPS 2023 R0-FoMo best paper honorable mention; UAI 2022 best student paper runner up
Current position: Research Scientist at Scaled Cognition
Sayali Anil Alatkar
Dissertation: Biologically interpretable latent representations in single-cell multimodalities
Advisor: Daifeng Wang
Shubham Bharti
Dissertation: Optimally Teaching Learning Agents under Various Constraints
Advisor: Xiaojin Zhu
Current position: Research Scientist at Google
Song Bian
Dissertation: Architecture Design for Efficient LLM Training and Inference
Advisor: Shivaram Venkataraman
Quinn Burke
Dissertation: Robust, Low-Cost Integrity Protocols for Modern Cloud Storage Systems
Advisor: Patrick McDaniel
Current position: Assistant Professor, Computer Science Department, University of Arizona
Ting Cai
Dissertation: Semantic Enrichment for Data Catalogs
Advisor: Anhai Doan
Shin Changho
Dissertation: Data-Centric AI: Principles and Methods for Learning from Imperfect Supervision
Advisor: Frederic Sala
Jihye Choi
Dissertation:Toward Trustworthy Agentic AI: Systemic Layers
Advisor: Somesh Jha
Current position: Research Scientist, Security & Privacy at NVIDIA Research
Sotirios Panagiotis Chytas
Dissertation: Understanding and Imposing Structure in Latent Spaces
Advisor: Vikas Singh
Current position: AI Research Scientist at Apple
Yifan Dai
Dissertation: Memory Efficiency in Modern Data Processing Systems
Co-advisors: Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau, Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau
Matthew Dutson
Dissertation: Augmenting Frame-Based Vision With Temporal Context
Advisor: Mohit Gupta
Current position: Research and engineering at Ubicept, a computational imaging startup
Zheliang (Austen) Fan
Dissertation: Lower Bounds for Sum-Product Queries
Co-advisors: Paraschos Koutris, Jin-Yi Cai
Awards: Research Highlight Award, SIGMOD 2025; Best Paper Award, PODS 2025; Distinguished Paper Award, PODS 2025 & 2024
Current position: Quantitative Researcher at Jump Trading
Angeliki Giannou
Dissertation: The Expressive Power of Transformers
Advisor: Dimitris Papailiopoulo
Sangeetha Grama Srinivasan
Dissertation: Synergistic Integration of Deep Learning in physics-based simulation
Advisor: Eftychios Sifakis
Awards: CS department Summer Research Fellowship, 2020
Current position: Research Scientist, Spatial Intelligence Lab at Nvidia
Yang Guo
Dissertation: Model Adaptation with Applications in Adversarial Robustness and Large Language Model
Co-advisors: Yingyu Liang, Robert Nowak
Current position: Machine learning scientist at TikTok
Hangtao Hao
Dissertation: Advancing Models and Inference for Disease Progression from Cross-Sectional Data
Advisor: Joseph Austerweil
Blaine Hoak
Dissertation:Uncovering the Mechanisms of Adversarial Vulnerability in Vision AI Models
Advisor: Patrick McDaniel
Awards: MIT EECS Rising Star (2025)
Current position: Assistant Professor of Computer Science at The University of Texas at Dallas
Guanzhou Hu
Dissertation: Cloud Consensus Protocols with Optimistic Connectivity
Co-advisors: Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau, Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau
Current position: Applied Scientist at Amazon Web Services
Yaxin Hu
Dissertation: Agentic Telepresence Robots for Supporting Inclusive and Meaningful Engagements in Remote Space
Advisor: Bilge Mutlu
Current position: Tenure-Track Assistant Professor of CS at the College of William & Mary
Deepak Sirone Jegan
Dissertation: Leveraging Execution Models for Designing Secure Services
Advisor: Michael Swift
Current position: Research Scientist at Meta
Noah Cohen Kalafut
Dissertation: Biologically-aware multimodal representation learning deciphers single-cell functions and dynamics
Advisor: Daifeng Wang
Konstantinos Kanellis
Dissertation: Intelligent and Scalable Internal-External Optimizations for Data Systems
Advisor: Shivaram Venkataraman
Awards: Landweber NCR Graduate Fellowship in Distributed Systems (2025), UW CS Summer Research Award (2020)
Current position: Applied Scientist at Amazon Web Services
Shuyao Li
Dissertation: Efficient Algorithms for Convex and Nonconvex Optimization Under Adversarial Outliers and Distributional Shifts
Co-advisors: Jelena Diakonikolas, Stephen Wright
Ashwin Maran
Dissertation: Classifying Counting Complexity of Planar Graph Homomorphism problems with Planar Edge Gadgets
Advisor: Jin-yi Cai
Awards: 2026 CS Department Best Dissertation Award, 2025 Ce-an Zuo & Chao-ming Wang Scholarship, 2022 Graduate Instructor of the Year Award
Current position: Research Scientist at Meta
Jeremy McMahan
Dissertation: Safe Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning in Polynomial Time
Advisor: Jerry Zhu
Timothy Ossowski
Dissertation: Structuring Multimodal Data for Medical Reasoning
Advisor: Junjie Hu
Sourav Pal
Dissertation: Efficient “Learn the Dynamics” Modules Are All You Need
Advisor: Vikas Singh
Current position: Senior Applied Scientist at Microsoft
Derek Paulsen
Dissertation: Toward Effective Blocking for Entity Matching
Advisor: Anhai Doan
Thanasis Pittas
Dissertation: Efficient Algorithms for High-Dimensional Robust Statistics: From Arbitrary Outliers to Structured Contamination
Advisor: Ilias Diakonikolas
Awards: Ivanisevic Award 2026
Current position: Applied Scientist at Amazon
Nicholas Roberts
Dissertation: The Science of Foundation Models for Science
Advisor: Frederic Sala
Awards: Honorable mention for the Jane Street Graduate Research Fellowship (2025), MLCommons Rising Star award (2023), Prove AI Fellowship (2021)
Current position: Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Princeton University (Princeton Language and Intelligence)
Vinay Sahadevappa Banakar
Dissertation: Layout-Aware Data Organization For Heterogeneous Hierarchies
Co-advisors: Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau, Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau
Awards: WISL Thesis Award – SOSP 2025, SOSP 2024, VLDB 2023, Student Grant
Current position: Research Engineer at Machine Learning Performance Team at Google
Amanpreet Singh Saini
Dissertation: Cymphony: Toward a Crowdsourcing Platform for Data Integration
Advisor: Anhai Doan
Carter Sifferman
Dissertation: 3D Vision with Miniature Time-of-Flight Sensors
Co-advisors: Michael Gleicher, Mohit Gupta
Awards: NSF INTEGRATE Fellowship
Current position: Machine Learning Engineer at Blue River Technology
Sophie Stephenson
Dissertation: Interpersonal Security and Privacy: Emerging Threats and Sociotechnical Defenses
Advisor: Rahul Chatterjee
Awards: CS Department Best Dissertation Award, ACM CHI ‘26 Best Paper Award, Heidelberg Laureate Forum Young Researcher
Current position: Tenure-track assistant professor of CSE at University of Texas at Arlington
Yutian Tao
Dissertation: Scalable Numerical Solvers for Incompressible Flow Applications
Advisor: Eftychios Sifakis
Current position: Software Engineer at Google
Kaiwei Tu
Dissertation: Optimizing Modern Heterogeneous Systems: From Storage to Memory
Co-advisors: Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau, Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau
Current position: Research Scientist at Meta
Shayne Wadle
Dissertation: Leveraging Heterogeneous Multicore for Single-Thread Performance
Advisor: Karthikeyan Sankaralingam
Jiayu Wang
Dissertation:Towards Efficient and Intelligent Foundation Models and Agentic Systems
Co-advisors: Aws Albarghouthi, Frederic Sala
Current position: Research Scientist at Salesforce AI Research
Yeping Wang
Dissertation:Flexibility-Aware Motion Generation for Constrained Manipulation Tasks
Advisor: Michael Gleicher
Zi Wang
Dissertation: Programming Language Principles for AI systems: Interpretation, Duality and Incremental Computation
Advisor: Somesh Jha
Yibing Wei
Dissertation: Towards Learning Structured Latent Visual Representations
Advisor: Pedro Morgado
Sujay Yadalam Sudarshan
Dissertation: Memory and storage architectures for modern datacenters
Advisor: Michael Swift
Awards: Lawrence H. Landweber NCR Fellowship 2024-2025, Distinguished Artifact Award ASPLOS 2024
Current position: Postdoc at University of Texas at Austin
Liu Yang
Dissertation: Internal Representations, Computation, and Efficiency in Transformers
Co-advisors: Robert Nowak, Dimitris Papailiopoulos, Kangwook Lee
Yifei Yang
Dissertation: High-Performance OLAP Across the Stack: From Algorithmic Data Reduction to Cloud- and GPU-Native Execution Engines
Advisor: Xiangyao Yu
Awards: Klug NCR Graduate Fellowship in Database Systems
Current position: Software Engineer at Databricks
Chenhao Ye
Dissertation: Scale and Performance in Memory-Centric Storage
Co-advisors: Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau, Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau
Current position: Research Scientist at ByteDance
Bobbi Yogatama
Dissertation: Towards Large-Scale and Practical Data Analytics on GPUs
Advisor: Xiangyao Yu
Awards: Anthony Klug C NCR Fellowship in Database Systems 2024, NVIDIA Graduate Fellowship’s Finalist 2023, NVIDIA Graduate Fellowship’s Finalist 2024
Current position: Systems Software Engineer, NVIDIA
Benjamin Young
Dissertation: Indistinguishability: Counting, Constraints, and Contractions
Advisor: Jin-yi Cai
Awards: Graduate Student Instructor Award Best Student Paper; Track A, ICALP 2025 Cisco Systems Distinguished Graduate Fellowship
Current position: Postdoc at IT University of Copenhagen
Zhuoran Yu
Dissertation: Data Centric Visual Intelligence: from Unimodal to Multimodal
Advisor: Yong-Jae Lee
Zeng Yuchen
Dissertation: Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models
Advisor: Kangwook Lee
Nikos Zarifis
Dissertation: Robustly Learning Multi-Index Models
Advisor: Ilias Diakonikolas
Awards: Outstanding Graduate Student Research Award UW Madison 2025, Ivanisevic Award 2024
Current position: Postdoc at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Jifan Zhang
Dissertation: Make Active Learning Terrific Again: Methods and Applications for Data Imbalance, Large Language Models, and Human Preferences
Advisor: Robert Nowak
Current position: Technical Staff, Thinking Machines Lab
Ling Zhang
Dissertation: Efficient Query Processing in Resource Constrained Settings: A Workload-Aware Approach to Optimization and Prediction
Co-advisors: Jignesh Patel, Karthikeyan Sankaralingam