Current PhD Students

Richard Brutti
Richard Brutti
PhD Candidate

Richard received his BA in Italian and Linguistics from Boston College. He worked in translation before completing the CL Master's program at Brandeis. He then worked at Amazon and Cogito before rejoining the Brandeis PhD program. His work focuses on multimodal semantic representations.

Jayeol
Jayeol Chun
PhD Candidate

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.

eben holderness
Eben Holderness
PhD Candidate

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.

Jin Zhao
Jin Zhao
PhD Candidate

Jin Zhao is a PhD candidate in Professor Nianwen Xue's reserach group.

varun-ramesh
Varun Ramesh Jois
PhD Candidate

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.

Shubham Kaushik
Shubham Kaushik
PhD Candidate

Shubham is a PhD student in computer science at Brandeis, working on problems in data systems under the supervision of Professor Subhadeep Sarkar. Before joining Brandeis, Shubham earned his MS in computer science with a specialization in data-centric computing from Boston University. Shubham is a practitioner of yoga, currently focused on mastering Tarakṣvāsana. In his free time, Shubham loves contributing to different communities, attending hackathons, and meeting new people.

Derrick Kim
Derrick Kim
PhD Candidate

Derrick received a BA in computer science from New York University and a MS in Computer Science from USC. At Brandeis, he hopes to further strengthen his technical and mathematical background, and is interested in computer vision, visual computing, and natural language processing.

Kenneth Lai
Kenneth Lai
PhD Candidate

Ken is a PhD candidate in Professor James Pustejovsky's research group.

JIazheng Li
Jiazheng Li
PhD Candidate

Jiazheng is a PhD student in Computer Science under the supervision of Professor Chuxu Zhang. He received a BEng in Biomedical Engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University with a focus on medical image analysis. At Brandeis, he is researching machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Yunrui Li
Yunrui Li
PhD Candidate

Yunrui earned her undergraduate degree from Rutgers University. Prior to enrolling in the PhD program in Computer Science at Brandeis University, she developed models in the finance sector. Her research focuses on the cross-disciplinary application of Machine Learning methods to datasets in physics and chemistry.

Kelley Lynch
Kelly Lynch
PhD Candidate

Kelly is a PhD candidate in Professor James Pustejovksy's research group.

Chester Palen-Michel
Chester Palen-Michel
PhD Candidate

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.

James Petullo
James Petullo
PhD Candidate

James received a BA in Computer Science from Assumption University. His research interests include web data mining and educational game development. In his free time, James likes to solve programming puzzles and code golf challenges.

Jonne Sälevä
Jonne Sälevä
PhD Candidate

As a PhD student in computer science, Jonne is working on problems in low-resource and multilingual NLP under the supervision of 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.

Haibo Sun
Haibo Sun
PhD Candidate

Haibo Sun is a PhD candidate working with Professor Nianwen Xue in computational linguistics. He is interested in the combination of reinforcement learning, semantic parsing, and symbolic reasoning.

Jingxuan Tu
Jingxuan Tu
PhD Candidate

Jingxuan received his MS in computational linguistics from Brandeis. He is currently a PhD student in Computer Science at Brandeis University under the supervision of Professor James Pustejovsky. He is interested in semantic reasoning and inference in NLP.

Ella Tuson
Ella Tuson
PhD Candidate

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_wang
Yifei Wang
PhD Candidate

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.

tom willkens
Thomas Willkens
PhD Candidate

As a Phd student in compter science, Thomas is working under the supervision of 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.

Ziao Yang
Ziao Yang
PhD Candidate

Ziao obtained his bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Sun Yat-Sen University. He found his passion in machine learning during his time at Sun Yat-Sen University and decided to pursue a doctoral degree in Brandeis University under the supervision of Professor Hongfu Liu. His research focus on Data Centric Machine Learning and Foundation Models.

Bingyang Ye

Bingyang Ye is a frist year PhD candidate in Natural Language Processing supervised by Prof. James Pustejovsky. He earned his MS degree in Computational Linguistics from Brandeis University and his BA in English & French from Nanjing Normal University, and worked as a NLP Scientist at CodaMetrix with a focus in Clinical NLP in between his studies. Bingyang's academic focuses include Natural Language Understanding, Computational Linguistics, Language Annotation, Clinical NLP, and ML/DL in general.

Han Yue
Han Yue
PhD Candidate

Han Yue is a PhD student in computer science, supervised by Prof. Hongfu Liu. His research interests include machine learning and real-world applications. Before coming to Brandeis, he received his bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Technology from Harbin Institute of Technology and master's degree in Computer Science and Technology from the Institute of Software, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences. 

Zhang
Chi Zhang
PhD Candidate

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.

Wenxiao Xiao
Wenxiao Xiao
PhD Candidate

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.

Zhengyang Zhou
Zhengyang Zhou
PhD Candidate

Zhengyang is a PhD candidate in Professor Pengyu Hong's research group.

YIfan Zhu
Yifan Zhu
PhD Candidate

Yifan Zhu is a PhD candidate and a Michtom fellow.