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PhD Students

PhD Students: S - Z

Student Track: Artificial Intelligence
Research Area: AI and Law, Deep Learning, Natural Language Processing
Advisor(s): Hammond, Kristian
Cohort: September 2019
Research Statement: Sergio's research is primarily focused on the intersection of machine learning and law. Specifically, his work explores how large language models can be used to extract information and reason over legal documents.
Sergio's Website
Email Sergio

Student Track: Theory
Research Area: Large Lanugage Model, Algorithmic Game Theory, Social Choice
Advisor(s): Edith Elkind
Cohort: September 2025
Expected Graduation Date: June 2030
Xingchen's Website
Email Xingchen

Student Track: Theory
Advisor(s): Hartline, Jason
Cohort: September 2021
Email Anant

Student Track: Graphics and Interactive Media
Research Area: Mobile Health
Advisor(s): Nabil Alshurafa
Cohort: September 2020
Expected Graduation Date: December 2025
Research Statement: My research lies at the intersection of mobile health, wearable and multimodal sensing, and machine learning to understand human behaviors. My goal is to design and validate sensing systems and computational methods that can detect, analyze, and ultimately intervene in behaviors relevant for well-being, while balancing concerns of privacy and scalability.
Email Farzad

Cohort: September 2023
Email Shubham

Cohort: September 2025
Email Daniel

Student Track: Security and Privacy
Advisor(s): Xing, Xinyu
Cohort: September 2022
Email Wenxuan

Student Track: Artificial Intelligence
Research Area: Explainable AI
Advisor(s): Jessica Hullman
Cohort: September 2023
Expected Graduation Date: June 2030
Research Statement: My current research focuses on explainable AI, with an emphasis on making LLMs more interpretable to humans. I am also interested in the real-world applications of AI, as I believe the ultimate goal of AI research is to create technologies that benefit society.
Dong's Website
Email Dong

Student Track: Computer Engineering
Research Area: Energy Harvesting
Advisor(s): Hester, Josiah
Cohort: September 2021
Expected Graduation Date: June 2026
Research Statement: The fundamental goal of my research is to use technology to do the most good for people, and in particular, for the marginalized communities that the STEM fields and the people who control them have failed and exploited throughout history. I focus on designing robust and accessible systems that empower these groups to monitor their homes and communities for environmental pollution. This data can be used to hold corporations to account for the damage they cause, and also to target mitigation strategies where they will be most effective.
Alexis' Website
Email Alexis

Student Track: Theory
Advisor(s): Aravindan Vijayaraghavan
Cohort: September 2024
Expected Graduation Date: August 2029
Tanmay Kumar's Website
Email Tanmay Kumar

Student Track: CSLS
Research Area: Sports, Technology, and Learning
Advisor(s): Worsley, Marcelo
Cohort: September 2020
Expected Graduation Date: June 2025
Research Statement: Michael Smith is a Computer Science and Learning Sciences PhD student at Northwestern University, and a National GEM Consortium PhD Fellow. Some of his research and project interests include exploring the intersections of technology & education, formal and informal learning, computing culture, new media and community, and games.
Michael's Website
Email Michael

Student Track: Systems and Networking
Advisor(s): Rogers, Jennie
Cohort: September 2022
Email Donghyun

Student Track: Artificial Intelligence
Advisor(s): Subrahmanian, VS
Cohort: September 2022
Email Lirika

Student Track: Systems and Networking
Advisor(s): Campanoni, Simone
Cohort: September 2022
Email Federico

Student Track: Theory
Research Area: Algorithms, Foundations of Machine Learning
Advisor(s): Vijayaraghavan, Aravindan
Cohort: September 2021
Expected Graduation Date: March 2026
Research Statement: Vaidehi is a Ph.D. student in the theory group, advised by Aravindan Vijayaraghavan. She works on providing provable guarantees for machine learning tasks. A running technical theme in her work has been the use of beyond worst-case analysis to establish new kinds of theoretical guarantees. Before Northwestern, she earned her B.S. in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, and was a Fulbright visiting student at the University of Vienna in the Theory and Applications of Algorithms group.
Vaidehi's Website
Email Vaidehi

Student Track: Artificial Intelligence
Research Area: Natural Language Processing
Advisor(s): Hammond, Kristian
Cohort: September 2019
Expected Graduation Date: December 2025
Research Statement: My research focuses on leveraging AI and large language models (LLMs) to automate data science processes, enabling users to ask questions of their data and receive meaningful, contextualized insights.
Marko's Website
Email Marko

Student Track: Interfaces
Research Area: Evolutionary & differentiable design, robot learning, artificial life
Advisor(s): Sam Kriegman
Cohort: September 2023
Expected Graduation Date: June 2028
Luke's Website
Email Luke

Cohort: September 2025
Email Maojiang

Student Track: Systems
Research Area: Parallelizing Compilers, Runtime Techniques, Heterogeneous Systems
Advisor(s): Campanoni, Simone
Cohort: September 2021
Expected Graduation Date: June 2026
Research Statement: Yian is a fifth-year PhD candidate in Computer Science at Northwestern University, working with Professor Simone Campanoni in the ARCANA Lab. He researches compilers and runtime techniques for parallel and heterogeneous systems. His work focuses on enabling developers to write high-level, architecture-agnostic parallel programs while generating efficient and portable binaries across diverse hardware platforms. He builds compiler infrastructures and scheduling frameworks that lower the barrier to performance portability, making high-performance computing more accessible to a broader range of programmers and researchers. His broader interests include parallelizing compilers, static and dynamic program analysis, and compiler optimizations designed to scale with growing program complexity and hardware diversity.
Yian's Website
Email Yian

Cohort: September 2023
Email Xinqian

Student Track: Systems
Research Area: Security and Privacy
Advisor(s): Wang, Xiao
Cohort: June 2021
Expected Graduation Date: 2026
Research Statement: My research interests mainly focus on security and privacy. I am working on oblivious transfer, multi-party computation, and zero-knowledge proof to propel them into practical use in systems.
Yunqing's Website
Email Yunqing

Student Track: Systems
Research Area: Databases
Advisor(s): Hartline, Jason D; Naughton, Jeffrey
Cohort: September 2016
Email Madhav

Cohort: September 2023
Email Gefei

Cohort: September 2024
Email Yuxiao

Cohort: September 2024
Email Xudong

Student Track: TSB
Research Area: Human-Computer Interaction
Advisor(s): Darren Gergle
Cohort: September 2024
Expected Graduation Date: December 2029
Research Statement: My research brings together people with diverse abilities and perspectives through communication and collaboration, particularly in visual and spatial contexts. Before becoming a computer scientist and HCI researcher, I was an architect who designed spaces.
Yuanyang's Website
Email Yuanyang

Student Track: Systems and Networking
Advisor(s): Bustamante, Fabian
Cohort: September 2022
Email Kedar

Student Track: Interfaces
Research Area: Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)
Advisor(s): Jacobs, Maia
Cohort: September 2021
Expected Graduation Date: June 2027
Research Statement: I am a U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellow (GRFP), Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Researcher, and PhD Candidate in the department of Computer Science (CS) at Northwestern University (NU). I specialize in using and developing Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) methods to design and evaluate human-centered Artificial Intelligence(AI). I have worked with Microsoft on GenAI for Software Development; Northwestern University on AI (broadly) for healthcare; The NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research on UX for data visualization software. My ongoing interdisciplinary doctoral research focuses on developing and applying participatory design methods to co-design AI across different healthcare contexts. Research interests/experience: Human-Computer Interaction; artificial intelligence/machine learning/GenAI + design; UX; digital interventions; behavioral science, participatory design methods; software engineering; applied research.
Mara's Website
Email Mara

Student Track: Graphics and Interactive Media
Research Area: Applied Machine Learning
Advisor(s): Alshurafa, Nabil
Cohort: March 2021
Expected Graduation Date: N/A
Research Statement: Soroush’s research is focused on human activity recognition using wearable devices such as wearable cameras. Specifically, he is interested in detecting activities that has implications for human health such as eating and smoking. Recently, he worked on addressing privacy aspects of wearable cameras using image obfuscation techniques. Prior to joining Northwestern University, Soroush got a Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering from the University of Tehran.
Soroush Shahi's Website
Email Soroush Shahi

Student Track: Theory
Advisor(s): Hartline, Jason
Cohort: January 2021
Email Matthew

Cohort: September 2024
Email Zihan

Cohort: September 2024
Email Kangrui

Student Track: Interfaces
Research Area: Robotics, Machine Learning
Advisor(s): Prof. Sam Kriegman
Cohort: September 2025
Expected Graduation Date: June 2030
Research Statement: My research interests lie at the intersection of machine learning and robotics, with a particular focus on dataset creation, data processing, ML model design, and conducting real-world experiments for diverse, multimodal robotic manipulation tasks in both simulated and real-world environments. My goal is to enable robots to generalize across a wide range of tasks and environments while minimizing reliance on labor-intensive data collection. I am currently exploring the potential of genetic algorithms on robot design and learning.
Yibin's Website
Email Yibin

Research Area: Embodied Agent, Multi-Modality, Large Language Models
Advisor(s): Manling Li
Cohort: September 2024
Qineng's Website
Email Qineng

Student Track: Theory
Research Area: algorithmic game theory, mechanism design
Advisor(s): Hartline, Jason
Cohort: September 2023
Email Chang

Advisor(s): Liu, Han
Cohort: September 2021
Email Jiayi

Student Track: Systems
Research Area: Internet Measurement, Internet Resilience
Advisor(s): Bustamante, Fabian
Cohort: September 2022
Expected Graduation Date: June 2027
Caleb's Website
Email Caleb

Student Track: Artificial Intelligence
Advisor(s): Liu, Han
Cohort: September 2018
Email Ning

Student Track: Systems
Research Area: Cyber Security, Advanced Attack Techniques, Threat Detection
Advisor(s): Chen, Yan
Cohort: September 2020
Expected Graduation Date: 2025
Research Statement: My research is centered around system security and cyberattacks, with a focus on developing and optimizing Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) systems and Host Intrusion Detection Systems (HIDS) systems to detect and defend against Advanced Persistent Threats (APT). My research involves behavior analysis of software, AI security, and the development of the Knowledge Base to enhance our understanding of cyberattack techniques to improve system security and protect against evolving threats in the digital space.
Lingzhi's Website
Email Lingzhi

Student Track: Systems
Research Area: Operating Systems, Parallel Systems, High Performance Computing
Advisor(s): Dinda, Peter
Cohort: September 2021
Expected Graduation Date: 2026
Research Statement: My research falls broadly into the category of kernel support for specialized application requirements and parallelism. I enjoy finding novel ways of enabling new programming models by adding support at the lowest levels of the operating system kernel.
Nick's Website
Email Nick

Student Track: Interfaces
Research Area: Mobile Health
Advisor(s): Alshurafa, Nabil
Cohort: September 2020
Email Boyang

Cohort: September 2024
Email Yibo

Student Track: Computer Engineering
Research Area: Architecture, Parallel Systems
Advisor(s): Dinda, Peter; Hardavellas, Nikos
Cohort: September 2019
Email Michael

Cohort: September 2024
Email Di

Cohort: September 2023
Email Weimin

Cohort: September 2023
Email Shang

Student Track: Artificial Intelligence
Research Area: ML Theory
Advisor(s): Liu, Han
Cohort: September 2024
Research Statement: I do theories of ML
Email Dennis

Student Track: Theory
Research Area: Economics
Advisor(s): Liang, Annie
Cohort: September 2020
Expected Graduation Date: December 2025
Research Statement: My research interest is the applications of Computer Science in Economics. I apply data science and machine learning techniques to problems in decision theory and network of economics, especially for model building and evaluation.
Chaofeng's Website
Email Chaofeng

Student Track: Systems
Research Area: Security and Privacy
Advisor(s): Xing, Xinyu
Cohort: March 2022
Email Yuhang

Student Track: Interfaces
Research Area: HCI
Advisor(s): Worsley, Marcelo
Cohort: September 2024
Expected Graduation Date: June 2029
Research Statement: I study human-AI interaction and multimodal analytics, working primarily on designing and evaluating AI-augmented multimodal interactive systems to enhance human experiences. My current work focuses on developing LLM-powered intelligent analytics dashboards to support data-driven, context-aware collaboration practices.
Dawei's Website
Email Dawei

Student Track: Computer Engineering
Research Area: Artificial Intelligence
Advisor(s): Zhu, Qi
Cohort: June 2018
Expected Graduation Date: June 2023
Research Statement: Shichao Xu is a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in the Computer Science Department at Northwestern University, and his advisor is Prof Qi Zhu. He received his undergraduate degree from Shanghai Jiao Tong University (ACM Honors Class) in 2018. His current research interests mainly focus on Learning from Limited or Imperfect Data, especially for dealing with the problem of data insufficiency, and poor data quality. The related topics include deep representation learning, domain adaptation, self/weakly/semi-supervised learning, transfer learning, and reinforcement learning with application to vision, multimodal, and control problems.
Shichao's Website
Email Shichao

Student Track: Artificial Intelligence
Research Area: Cognitive Systens
Advisor(s): Forbus, Kenneth
Cohort: June 2021
Expected Graduation Date: June 2026
Research Statement: My primary research interests focus on analogical reasoning and learning, natural language understanding, and interactive task learning. I’m exploring the general methods for the AI system to learn tasks via interactions with humans, including task-independent natural language and demonstrations, and accumulate knowledge that can be operationalized in the task environment or transferred in future learning. I’m also investigating analogy as a core mechanism for acquiring the underlying task concepts and procedures and adapting and grounding them in novel situations.
Wangcheng's Website
Email Wangcheng

Student Track: Artificial Intelligence
Research Area: Robotics
Advisor(s): Liu, Han
Cohort: September 2020
Expected Graduation Date: June 2025
Research Statement: My research interest lies on the intersection of the robotic learning and cloud robotics. I am interested in the Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, Cloud Robotics, Differentiable Robot Simulation.
Guo's Website
Email Guo

Student Track: Artificial Intelligence
Cohort: January 2013
Email Chen

Student Track: Systems
Research Area: Security and Privacy
Advisor(s): Xing, Xinyu
Cohort: January 2022
Expected Graduation Date: June 2026
Research Statement: My research interests focus on utilizing deep learning to address the issues in security and privacy. In addition, I work on explainable machine learning to help understand the machine learning model and trust the behavior.
Jiahao's Website
Email Jiahao

Student Track: Security and Privacy
Advisor(s): Xing, Xinyu
Cohort: September 2022
Email Zheng

Cohort: September 2025
Email Paul

Cohort: September 2025
Email Jianshu

Cohort: September 2024
Email Ying

Cohort: September 2024
Email Pingyue

Student Track: TSB
Advisor(s): Shaw, Aaron; Horvat, Emoke-Agnes
Cohort: September 2021
Email Richard

Student Track: Theory
Research Area: Game Theory
Advisor(s): Hartline, Jason D; Dimoulas, Christos
Cohort: September 2018
Chenhao's Website
Email Chenhao

Student Track: Security and Privacy
Advisor(s): Wang, Xiao
Cohort: September 2022
Email Wenhao

Student Track: Systems
Research Area: Databases
Advisor(s): Crotty, Andrew
Cohort: September 2021
Expected Graduation Date: December 2026
Email Zheng

Student Track: Artificial Intelligence
Research Area: NLP, NLU
Advisor(s): Forbus, Kenneth
Cohort: September 2024
Expected Graduation Date: June 2029
Email Kexin

Student Track: Systems
Research Area: Security and Privacy
Advisor(s): Chen, Yan
Cohort: September 2018
Email Guannan

Student Track: Artificial Intelligence
Research Area: Multimodal Reasoning, Cognitive Modeling
Advisor(s): Forbus, Kenneth
Cohort: September 2024
Expected Graduation Date: June 2029
Email Jiahong

Student Track: Systems
Research Area: Quantum Computing
Advisor(s): Nikos Hardavellas
Cohort: September 2025
Expected Graduation Date: June 2030
Yuchen's Website
Email Yuchen

Student Track: Artificial Intelligence
Advisor(s): Liu, Han
Cohort: September 2022
Email Yufeng