My Advising Philosophy

Becoming an independent researcher requires developing a variety of skills: presentation, writing, collaboration, critical thinking, problem formulation, experimental design, and the ability to navigate uncertainty and failure. A PhD is your training period to develop these skills. My role as your advisor is to make this training as effective and beneficial as possible.

To achieve this, I commit to:

• Personalized mentoring: I will work to understand your strengths and weaknesses and provide tailored guidance to help you develop the skills you need. Beyond research, I will help you with career planning and developing the professional skills you need for your future career
• Providing resources: Thanks to generous support from TACC (Texas Advanced Computing Center), I have substantial GPU hours (for H100/H200) available to support model training and experiments of various scales without resource constraints. Beyond compute, I will also provide API credits, human evaluation budgets, and support for conference travel. I will do my best to bring in funding for your RA position through projects aligned with your research direction
• Creating an enabling environment: I will build a supportive and inclusive lab culture where you can thrive academically

At the foundation of all this is my belief that your PhD journey should be sustainable and fulfilling. Mental health and wellbeing are top priorities. I encourage students to maintain hobbies and relationships outside of work, which are essential to doing good research over the long term.

What I'm Looking For

• Self-motivated learners: I invest significant effort in supporting my students, and I'm looking for students who will make the most of these opportunities and are committed to their own growth and development
• Interest in humans and society: My research interests are broad, but the common denominator is humans. I'm looking for people who think not just about technology, but about the people and society who create and use it. If you naturally consider these human and social dimensions in your research questions, we're likely to be excited about similar problems
• Strong technical background: While we study people, our methods are computational. As someone who studied CS in both undergrad and graduate school, I want to emphasize that computational methods are central to our work. I'm looking for students who can process large-scale data, implement and modify state-of-the-art machine learning methods and AI models, conduct large-scale analyses, and produce rigorous experiments and results suitable for top-tier conferences

How to Apply

If you think we have a good fit based on this information, the best way to express your interest is through this Google form. Explaining why you believe we're a good fit can help me see that we're a good match.

I receive many emails daily and cannot respond to all inquiries. Submitting through the Google form ensures your application gets reviewed, and I will reach out if I see a strong alignment in research interests and availability.

Additionally, please apply to the UT Austin Information School PhD program and mention my name as a faculty member you'd like to work with. Whether or not you hear back from me, I will review your application if you apply to the program. Submitting the interest form is not required.

I find it incredibly rewarding to mentor the next generation of researchers. I enjoy working with interns and visiting scholars, helping them lead their first first-author publications and transition into PhD programs at top-tier institutions. However, due to limited bandwidth, I can only host a very small number of visitors each year.

For a successful short- or mid-term collaboration, I generally look for two things:

1. A project that is well-scoped and has a clear plan before the collaboration begins
2. Sufficient technical proficiency to execute the project, allowing our sessions to focus on high-level strategy, framing, and experimental analysis

If you meet these criteria, you are welcome to reach out. Please understand that my primary commitment is to my current students, which means I cannot respond to all inquiries or accept every request for collaboration.