Current Ph.D. Students



Eben Holderness
Eben received his BA in linguistics and MS in computational linguistics from Brandeis. Before starting as a PhD student in the computer science department, he performed clinical NLP research at McLean Hospital, Harvard Medical School under the supervision of Prof. Mei Hall. He is advised by Prof. James Pustejovsky and is currently working in the Brandeis Lab for Linguistics and Computation on problems related to multimodal representations of language, semi-supervised learning, and human-computer interaction.
Ph.D. Candidate



Guirong Liu
Guirong received her B.A and M.S degree in Electrical, Electronics and Communication Engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University. During her graduate studies and research, she learned more about artificial intelligence (AI) and worked on several projects using neural networks, where she found her passion. Her interest in AI makes her want to further pursue a doctoral degree at Brandeis in AI related areas, such as natural language processing.
Ph.D. Candidate



Xiaodong Qu
Xiaodong received a B.S. degree in Computer Science from Dalian University of Technology. His research focuses on Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) with non-invasive electroencephalogram(EEG) data. He tried both clinical and nonclinical approaches with BCI data for activity recognition and disease detection etc. Personalization is one of the core findings because each individual's brain signals are so unique that the current BCI systems perform much better with personalized pattern recognition (A2E’18, FIE’18). Most of the time he is using deep learning frameworks (TensorFlow and Pytorch) on our own GPU-enhanced Linux servers or on cloud services such as Google Cloud and AWS.
Ph.D. Candidate

Jonne Saleva
Jonne is a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at Brandeis, where he is working on problems in low-resource and multilingual NLP with Professor Constantine Lignos. Before coming to Brandeis, Jonne received his A.B. in Statistics from Harvard College in 2017. In his free time, Jonne is an avid language learner, and is currently working towards fluency in French, his 6th language.
Ph.D. Candidate


Dimokritos received the BSc and MSc degrees in Computer Science from University of Crete, Greece, while working as a research associate at the Computer Architecture and VLSI (CARV) Laboratory at ICS-FORTH. He is now working towards his Ph.D. degree and as a research associate in the Computer Science department. His research interests include Distributed Storage Systems and Transactional Memory Systems.

Ella Tuson
Ella received a B.A. in Computer Science from Clark University. Her research interests include accessibility, computer-supported collaboration and cooperation, cognitive engineering, and the general field of human-computer interaction.
Ph.D. Candidate

Yifei Wang
PhD Candidate
Yifei received her B.S. degree in Pure and Applied Mathematics from Tsinghua University. Her undergraduate thesis was the analysis of sparse spectral clustering methods based on graph theory and optimization methods. Through several research experiences spanning from basic clustering models to more complex deep learning frameworks, she found her great passion in machine learning. She hopes to cultivate her academic and innovation ability as a Ph.D. student at Brandeis.

Thomas Willkens
Thomas is a Ph.D. Candidate in Computer Science working with Professor Jordan Pollack and the Brandeis DEMO Lab. His research interests include deep reinforcement learning, search and planning, the theory of games, evolutionary computation, and artificial life.
Ph.D. Candidate
