The Grainger College of Engineering
Siebel School of Computing and Data Science

Graduating PhD Students

Graduating PhD students, use this form to add yourself to this page.

Angello Astorga
  • Areas of Expertise:
    • Formal Methods
    • Software Engineering
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • Mining Specifications Modulo a Test Generator via Symbolic Analysis and Learning Algorithms
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Academia - Research
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 8/2023
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Tao Xie
Ayoosh Bansal
  • Areas of Expertise:
    • System Design
    • Real Time Systems
    • Safe use of AI
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • Safe and Secure Autonomous Vehicles
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Academia - Research
    • Industry - Research
    • Industry - Development
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 8/2024
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Lui Sha
Pedro Bello-Maldonado
  • Areas of Expertise:
    • Numerical Methods
    • High-Performance Computing
    • Scientific Computing
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • Polynomial Reductiong with Full Domain Decomposition Preconditioner for Spectral Element Poisson Solvers
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Academia - Research
    • Industry - Research
    • Industry - Development
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 12/2021
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Paul F. Fischer
Shant Boodaghians
  • Areas of Expertise:
    • Computational Economics
    • Algorithms for Noisy Data
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • Limited-Information Problems in Computational Economics
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Industry - Research
    • Industry - Development
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 5/2021
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Prof. Ruta Mehta
Liia M. Butler
  • Areas of Expertise:
    • Computer Science Education
    • Collaborative Learning
    • Testing and Debugging Education
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • Towards More Effective Testing and Debugging Education in Computer Science Courses
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Academia - Teaching
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 5/2025
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Geoffrey Herman
Xiaohong Chen
  • Areas of Expertise:
    • Programming Languages
    • Formal Methods
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • Matching Logic
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Academia - Research
    • Industry - Research
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 5/2023
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Grigore Rosu
Sarah Ashley Christensen
  • Areas of Expertise:
    • Optimization
    • Computational Biology
    • Algorithms
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • Algorithms for Phylogenetic Tree Correction in Species and Cancer Evolution
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Industry - Research
    • Industry - Development
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 12/2020
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Mohammed El-Kebir and Tandy Warnow
Pubali Datta
  • Areas of Expertise:
    • Auditing and Threat Analytics
    • Serverless Platform Security
    • System Security and Privacy
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • Defending against Emerging Threats in Serverless Computing
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Academia - Research
    • Industry - Research
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 8/2023
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Adam Bates
Himel Dev
  • Areas of Expertise:
    • Economics
    • Applied Machine Learning
    • Data Science
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • Modeling the Successes and Failures of Content Based Platforms
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Industry - Research
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 5/2021
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Prof. Hari Sundaram
Saikat Dutta
  • Areas of Expertise:
    • Testing Machine Learning Software
    • Software Engineering
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • Testing Machine Learning Libraries in the Presence of Randomness
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Academia - Research
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 8/2023
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Sasa Misailovic
Morgan Muriel Fong
  • Areas of Expertise:
    • Collaborative Learning
    • Sense of Belonging
    • Computer Science Education
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • Developing and Validating a Survey for Classroom-based Sense of Belonging in Computing
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Academia - Teaching
    • Academia - Research
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 5/2025
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Geoffrey L. Herman
Dongqi Fu
  • Areas of Expertise:
    • Network Science
    • Machine Learning
    • Data Mining
  • Dissertation Topic:
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Academia - Research
    • Industry - Research
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 5/2024
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Jingrui He
Yi R. Fung
  • Areas of Expertise:
    • Machine Learning
    • Natural Language Processing
    • AI
  • Dissertation Topic:
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Academia - Research
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 5/2024
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Heng Ji
Tanmay Gangwani
  • Areas of Expertise:
    • Deep Learning
    • Reinforcement Learning
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • Methods for Efficient Imitation and Exploration in Reinforcement Learning Algorithms
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Industry - Research
    • Industry - Development
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 5/2021
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Jian Peng
Chi Han
  • Areas of Expertise:
    • Representation Understanding
    • Large Language Models
    • Natural Language Processing
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • Mindreading and Surpassing Limits for Large Language Models
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Academia - Research
    • Industry - Research
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 12/2026
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Heng Ji
Wajih Hassan
  • Areas of Expertise:
    • Data Provenance
    • Intrusion Detection
    • Forensic Analysis
    • System Security
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • Towards Effective Threat Detection and Investigation with Provenance Analytics
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Academia - Research
    • Industry - Research
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 8/2021
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Adam Bates
Abdulrahman Hassan N Mahmoud
  • Areas of Expertise:
    • Computer Systems and Architecture
    • Hardware Resiliency
    • Approximate Computing
    • Machine Learning
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • Towards Scalable and Specialized Application Error Analysis
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Academia - Research
    • Industry - Research
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 12/2020
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Sarita Adve
Emily Marie Hastings
  • Areas of Expertise:
    • Computer-Supported Cooperative Work
    • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • Supporting Instructor Decisions on Algorithmic Team Formation through Integrating Stakeholder Voices
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Academia - Teaching
    • Academia - Research
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 5/2023
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Brian Bailey
Gaurush Hiranandani
  • Areas of Expertise:
    • Classification, Ranking, Recommendation
    • Metric Elicitation
    • Statistical Machine Learning
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • Classification Performance Metric Elicitation
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Industry - Research
    • Industry - Development
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 8/2021
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Prof. Sanmi Koyejo
Kathleen Isenegger
  • Areas of Expertise:
    • Broadening Participation in Comptuing
    • Computer Science Education
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • Broadening Participation in Computing Through Interventions to Overcome Cultural and Curricular Barriers
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Academia - Teaching
    • Academia - Research
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 5/2025
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Colleen M. Lewis
Suraj Jog
  • Areas of Expertise:
    • Applied AI/ML for Wireless Networks
    • IoT and Low Power WANs
    • RF Sensing
    • Wireless Networking
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • SCALABLE MILLIMETER WAVE WIRELESS NETWORKS
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Academia - Research
    • Industry - Research
    • Industry - Development
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 5/2022
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Prof. Haitham Hassanieh
Mitchell Francis Jones
  • Areas of Expertise:
    • Randomized & approximation algorithms
    • Computational geometry
    • Theoretical computer science
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • On the Search for Geometric Orders, Centers, and Separation
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Industry - Research
    • Industry - Development
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 8/2021
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Sariel Har-Peled
Keyur Joshi
  • Areas of Expertise:
    • Compilers
    • Formal Verification
    • Testing
    • Program Analysis
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • Compositional Analysis of the Effects of Uncertainty on Computations
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Industry - Research
    • Industry - Development
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 5/2024
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Sasa Misailovic
Adit Krishnan
  • Areas of Expertise:
    • Graph Mining, User Modeling, NLP
    • Recommendation Systems, Info Retrieval
    • Deep Learning and Neural Networks
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • User-Centric Deep Learning Methods and Applications
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Industry - Research
    • Industry - Development
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 5/2021
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Hari Sundaram
Paul M. Krogmeier
  • Areas of Expertise:
    • logic learning
    • program synthesis
  • Dissertation Topic:
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Academia - Research
    • Industry - Research
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 5/2024
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Madhusudan Parthasarathy
Hsuan-Chi Kuo
  • Areas of Expertise:
    • System security
    • Operating system
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • Attack Surface Reduction in Contemporary Operating Systems via Practical Kernel Debloating
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Industry - Research
    • Industry - Development
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 5/2022
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Sibin Mohan
Wing Lam
  • Areas of Expertise:
    • Software engineering
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • Software Testing in a Nondeterministic World
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Academia - Research
    • Industry - Research
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 8/2021
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Darko Marinov and Tao Xie
Jacob Scott Laurel
  • Areas of Expertise:
    • Abstract Interpretation
    • Embedded Systems
    • Static Analysis
    • Probabilistic Programming
    • Differentiable Programming
    • Programming Languages
  • Dissertation Topic:
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Academia - Research
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 5/2024
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Sasa Misailovic
Yi-Chieh Lee
  • Areas of Expertise:
    • CSCW
    • Conversational AI
    • Social computing
    • Human-centered AI
    • Human-computer interaction
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • Designing Conversational Agents to Promote Self-disclosure and Behavior Change
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Academia - Research
    • Industry - Research
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 5/2021
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Yun Huang
Linyi Li
  • Areas of Expertise:
    • Security
    • Machine Learning
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • Enabling large-scale certifiably trustworthy deep learning systems
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Academia - Research
    • Industry - Research
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 8/2023
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Bo Li and Tao Xie
Patrick Lin
  • Areas of Expertise:
    • Computational Topology
    • Computational Geometry
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • Equilibrium Graphs on Flat Tori
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Academia - Teaching
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 8/2021
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Jeff Erickson
Shelby L. Lockhart
  • Areas of Expertise:
    • High Performance Computing
    • Scientific Computing
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • Reducing Communication Bottlenecks in Iterative Solvers
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Academia - Research
    • Industry - Research
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 5/2023
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Luke Olson
Ian G. Ludden
  • Areas of Expertise:
    • Algorithmic Game Theory
    • Operations Research
    • Theory & Algorithms
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • Graph Partitioning: Redistricting Games and the Spherical Zoning Problem
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Academia - Teaching
    • Academia - Research
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 5/2023
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Sheldon Jacobson
Jaron Maurice Mink
  • Areas of Expertise:
    • Human Factors in Security and Privacy
    • Responsible ML
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • Human Factors in Secure and Non-Abusive AI
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Academia - Research
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 5/2024
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Gang Wang
Adithya Murali
  • Areas of Expertise:
    • Logic Learning
    • Program Synthesis
    • Program Verification
  • Dissertation Topic:
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Academia - Teaching
    • Academia - Research
    • Industry - Research
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 5/2024
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Madhusudan Parthasarathy
Haoran Qiu
  • Areas of Expertise:
    • ML for Systems
    • Cloud Computing
    • Distributed Systems
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • Efficient and Robust Online Learning in Cloud Datacenters
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Academia - Research
    • Industry - Research
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 5/2024
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Ravishankar K. Iyer
Adam James Stewart
  • Areas of Expertise:
    • Geospatial Data
    • Remote Sensing
    • Machine Learning
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • Applications of Geospatial Deep Learning
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Academia - Research
    • Industry - Development
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 8/2023
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Arindam Banerjee
Rohan Tabish
  • Areas of Expertise:
    • Predictability and Fault-Tolerance
    • Real-Time and Safe AI
    • Cyber-Physical Systems
    • Real Time and Embedded Systems
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • DESIGNING SAFETY-CRITICAL SYSTEMS USING COTS BASED HOMOGENEOUS AND HETEROGENEOUS MULTI-CORE PROCESSORS
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Academia - Research
    • Industry - Research
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 8/2021
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Marco Caccamo
Qingyun Wang
  • Areas of Expertise:
    • AI for Science
    • Natural Language Processing
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • AI Scientists: Toward Automated Literature Understanding and Scientific Discovery
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Academia - Research
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 5/2025
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Heng Ji
Xuan Wang
  • Areas of Expertise:
    • BioNLP
    • Biomedical Text Mining
    • Natural Language Processing
    • Data Mining
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • Minimum Supervised Text Mining for Literature-based Scientific Discovery
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Academia - Research
    • Industry - Research
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 5/2022
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Jiawei Han
Sam White
  • Areas of Expertise:
    • High Performance Computing
    • Scientific Computing
    • Parallel Computing
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • A Virtualized MPI Implementation Optimized for Shared Memory Systems
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Industry - Research
    • Industry - Development
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 12/2021
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Laxmikant (Sanjay) Kale
Jun Wu
  • Areas of Expertise:
    • Data Mining
    • Heterogeneous Machine Learning
    • Trustworthy Transfer Learning
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • Trustworthy Transfer Learning
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Academia - Research
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 5/2024
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Jingrui He
Ziang Xiao
  • Areas of Expertise:
    • Natural Language Processing
    • Interactive Computing
    • Behavioral Science Research
    • Conversational AI
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • Improving Survey Methods with Conversational AI
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Academia - Research
    • Industry - Research
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 5/2022
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Hari Sundaram; Karrie Karahalios
Cong Xie
  • Areas of Expertise:
    • Federated Learning
    • Distributed System
    • Machine Learning
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • Toward Communication-Efficient and Secure Distributed Machine Learning
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Industry - Research
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 5/2021
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Oluwasanmi Koyejo, Indranil Gupta
Le Xu
  • Areas of Expertise:
    • Distributed Systems and Cloud Computing
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • Elastic Techniques Mitigating Dynamism In Distributed Systems
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Academia - Research
    • Industry - Research
    • Industry - Development
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 8/2021
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Indranil Gupta
Carl Yang
  • Areas of Expertise:
    • Applied machine learning
    • Network data science
    • Graph data mining
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • Multi-Facet Graph Mining with Contextualized Projections
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Academia - Research
    • Industry - Research
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 12/2020
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Jiawei Han
Yu Zhang
  • Areas of Expertise:
    • AI for Science
    • Structure-Enhanced Text Mining
    • Data Mining
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • Structure-Enhanced Text Mining for Understanding and Augmenting Scientific Discovery
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Academia - Research
    • Industry - Research
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 5/2024
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Jiawei Han
Neil Zhao
  • Areas of Expertise:
    • Cloud Computing
    • System Security
    • Computer Architecture
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • You Share, You Leak, Practical Side-Channel Attacks and Defenses in Modern Clouds
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Academia - Research
    • Industry - Research
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 5/2024
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Josep Torrellas
Dawei Zhou
  • Areas of Expertise:
    • Rare Category Analysis
    • Machine Learning
    • Data Mining
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • Harnessing Rare Category Trinity for Complex Data
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Academia - Research
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 8/2021
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Jingrui He