Current PhD Students

Jayeol received a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics and computer science and physics from Emory University. The topic of his undergraduate thesis was semantic parsing, but Jayeol has also explored other research areas, such as evolutionary theory, medical imaging and differential expression analysis. At Brandeis, he hopes to further strengthen his technical and mathematical background while cultivating an interdisciplinary perspective to think about artificial general intelligence.

Solomon received a BA in mathematics from Bard College with a focus on mathematical logic and universal algebra. At Brandeis, he researches computer vision and video processing, and he is particularly interested in the relationship between image semantics and motion in video.

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 Professor Mei Hall. He is advised by Professor 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.

Varun received his BSc in mathematics and atatistics from St. Joseph's College, Bangalore. Before coming to Brandeis, he worked in data science for a sales consultancy startup. His interests lie in the intersection of computer vision and natural language processing.

Peizhao is a PhD student in the Michtom School of Computer Science at Brandeis University, supervised by Proessor Hongfu Liu. Before that, he received his bachelor's degree in electronic and information engineering from Beihang University. His research interests include machine learning, representation learning and relevant applications.

Growing up, we have been learning and then losing various skills, but not all. One notable exception is the communication skill, challenged and developed time after time as we meet new people and start conversation with them. Modeling that skill from computational linguistics perspective is Alex’s overarching research agenda. Specifically, he is interested in dialog systems, computational models of discourse, dynamic meaning representations and conversational corpus annotation. The real-life application he aims for is a social bot that provides language learners with personalized interactions to improve their communicative competence. He is co-advised by Professors Sophia Malamud and Nianwen Bert Xue.

Chester is broadly interested in natural language processing (NLP). More specifically, he is interested in expanding NLP tools for lower resource languages, information extraction, information retrieval and models of meaning. Previously, Chester worked as a research programmer at USC's Information Sciences Institute. He received his MS in computational linguistics from Brandeis and BA in Spanish and education from Kent State University.

Jonne is a PhD 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 AB in statistics from Harvard College in 2017. In his free time, Jonne is an avid language learner, currently working towards fluency in French, his sixth language.

Ella received a BA 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.

Yifei received her BS 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 PhD student at Brandeis.

Thomas is a PhD 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.

Wenxiao received his bachelor's degree in mathematics and applied mathematics from Sichuan University and his master's degree in statistics from the University of Connecticut before coming to Brandeis. He found his passion in machine learning during his time at Brandeis and decided to pursue a doctoral degree under the supervision of Professor Hongfu Liu. His research interests lie in computer vision, transfer learning and representation learning.

Chi earned his master's degree in data science at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. After working at two high-tech companies, Amazon and Ctrip, areas such as big data management, machine learning and AI became extremely interesting to him. He hopes to dig into these areas for research and make some contributions in the next few years. This has led him to Brandeis University, with its excellent reputation in science, where he is pursing his PhD in computer science.