PhD Students
Vinam Arora
Email: vinam@gatech.edu
Program: Machine Learning
Bio: Vinam Arora is a second-year PhD student in Machine Learning at Georgia Tech. He completed his undergraduate studies in Electronics at the Indian Institution of Technology (IIT) in Roorkee and worked as a Design Engineer at Texas Instruments. During his three years at Texas Instruments, he worked on various projects and gained expertise in different areas such as digital and analog design, verification, and simulation.
Webpage: https://www.vinam.dev/
Zihao Chen
Email: zchen959@gatech.edu
Program: PhD in Machine Learning
Bio: Zihao Chen is a second year PhD student in Machine Learning at Georgia Tech. He received his bachelor’s degree in Biology from Wuhan University and Master of Engineering in Biomedical Engineering from Fudan University in 2023. Zihao is interested in the confluence of machine learning, stochastic dynamics, and optimization theory. His research is currently focused on representation learning and optimization theory. Besides, he applies machine learning and reinforcement learning techniques to solve real-world problems, such as mining factors in the stock market. He leads an active lifestyle, full of jogging, swimming, and fitness.
Webpage: https://www.zihaoiz.com/
Divyansha Lachi
Email: divyansha@gatech.edu
Program: PhD in Machine Learning
Bio: Divyansha is a second year Ph.D. student in Machine Learning. She received her B.Tech in Computer Science and Engineering from the National Institute of Technology, Silchar, India. She is broadly interested in understanding biological intelligence to build better artificial intelligence. She wants to understand how the brain can robustly learn from just a handful of examples and develop machine-learning models capable of the same. To this end, some of her current interests include incorporating modularity in artificial neural networks (ANN) for functional specialization and improving Graph Neural Networks (GNN) by incorporating topological features of the brain (like long-range transmission). In her free time, Divyansha enjoys playing tennis and binging TV shows.
Webpage: https://divyansha1115.github.io/
Shivashriganesh Mahato
Email: smahato7@gatech.edu
Program: PhD in Machine Learning
Bio: Shivashriganesh Mahato is a first-year PhD student in Machine Learning at Georgia Tech. Previously, he received his BS in Applied Mathematics and MS in Computer Science from Texas A&M University, then worked as a Software Engineer at Capital One. He is broadly interested in the synergy between representation learning and computational neuroscience, with the goal of developing novel ML models motivated by scientific inquiries in neuroscience. His research is driven by the pursuit of advancing our understanding of neural and cognitive systems. Outside of research, he enjoys watching movies/TV shows, reading, and playing basketball.
Jingyun Xiao
Email: jxiao76@gatech.edu
Program: PhD in Machine Learning
Bio: Jingyun is a PhD student in Machine Learning at Georgia Tech. He received his bachelor’s degree in CS from University of Chinese Academy of Sciences and MS in Computer Science from Georgia Tech in 2023. Jingyun is broadly interested in the intersection topics of Artificial Intelligence and Natural Intelligence, especially Human Intelligence, like inspiring next-generation AI models with HI, 2)understanding HI better with AI tools, 3)exploring hybrid-intelligence by combining AI and HI. Outside research, he enjoys playing badminton, jogging and watching movies.
Masters Students
Alexandre Andre
Email: aandre8@gatech.edu
Program: MS in Computer Science
Bio: Alexandre Andre is a second-year Master’s student in Computer Science at Georgia Tech. He graduated with a Master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Technology of Compiègne. His research focuses on sequence modeling, spanning transformers to state-space models, with applications in neural population decoding and music recommendation systems.
Wenrui Ma
Program: Masters in Mathematics
Bio: Wenrui Ma is currently a second-year Master’s student in Mathematics at Georgia Tech. She graduated with a Bachelor’s degree majoring in Computer Science and minoring in Math from Hunan University in Changsha. She has developed a broad interest in various facets of machine learning throughout her study, with a particular emphasis on representation learning.
Undergraduate Students
Ian Knight
Email: ianknight@gatech.edu
Program: BS in Computer Science
Bio: Ian Knight is an undergraduate at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is interested in assistive robotics, physics, and computational neuroscience.
Julie Young
Email: jyoung369@gatech.edu
Program: BS in Computer Science
Bio: Julie Young is a third-year undergraduate student studying Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her degree focuses are Intelligence and Information Networks. She is interested in studying the intersection between biology and computer science and more specifically, how machine learning can be applied to neuroscience topics.
Research Affiliates
Aidan Schneider
Email: aidans@wustl.edu
Program: Computational and Systems Biology
Washington University in St. Louis
Bio: Aidan is a PhD student in Computational & Systems Biology at Washington University in St. Louis in the Hengen Lab and works in close collaboration with the NerDS Lab. He received a B.S. in Molecular BioSciences & Biotechnology and also a B.S. in Finance from Arizona State University in 2018. Aidan applies deep learning to characterize the influence of behavior, genetics, and anatomy on neuronal computations throughout the brain. He aims to develop models which generalize and transfer successfully across diverse contexts. He also hopes deep learning can facilitate insight from data with minimal pre-processing. Outside the lab, Aidan enjoys hiking and developing tabletop role-playing games.
Interns
Pablo Vempala
Bio: Pablo Vempala is a Senior at Midtown High School and a Research Assistant in the NerDS Lab at Georgia Tech. He is currently working on developing brain decoding methods for C elegans. Outside of school, he enjoys fly fishing, wrestling for his high school team, and playing video games. Pablo plans to pursue a degree in biology after graduation.
Alumni
Postdocs:
- Farahnaz Soleimani, 2017-2019 -> Assistant Professor at Oregon State University
Ph.D. students:
- Mehdi Azabou, 2020-2024, Outstanding Graduate Student in ECE (2024), Spotlight @ NeurIPS; PhD Thesis: Building a foundation model for neuroscience -> Now a Postdoc at Columbia University
- Ran Liu, 2019-2024; Rising Star in EECS (2023), CSIP Research Award (2023), Oral at NeurIPS; PhD Thesis: Generalizable and Explainable Methods for Learning from Physiological Data and Beyond -> Now at Apple
- Chi-Heng Lin, 2018-2022; TRIAD Research Fellowship (2020); PhD Thesis: “Understanding Data Manipulation and How to Leverage it to Improve Generalization” -> Now at Samsung Research
Graduate students:
- Venky Ganesh, 2022-2024 (MS) -> Now at NVIDIA
- Amrit Khera, 2023-2024 (MS)
- Keerthan Ramnath, 2022-2024 (MS) -> Now at Apple
- Aishwarya Balwani, 2018-2021 (PhD) -> Now in Hannah Choi’s lab @ Georgia Tech
- Kyle Milligan, 2018-2020 (PhD) -> Now at Northrup Grumman
- TJ LaGrow, 2017-2019 (PhD); NSF GRFP Honorable Mention -> Now in Shella Keilholz’s lab at Emory
Selected undergraduates and interns:
- Michael Mendelson, 2020-2024 (Undergrad); Presidential Undergraduate Research Award (PURA) (2022, 2023) -> PhD @ Columbia
- Matthew Jin, 2022-2023 (Undergrad) -> Masters @ Stanford
- Carolina Urzay, 2021-2022 (Undergrad) -> Masters @ TU Delft
- Joy M. Jackson, 2021-2022 (Undergrad); NSF GRFP (2023), REU SURE (2021) – Best Research in the Biomedical Category -> PhD Student at Georgia Tech w/ Alex Abramson
- Zijing Wu, 2020-2021 (Undergrad) -> Anqi Wu’s lab at Georgia Tech, Now PhD at McGill
- Max Dabagia, 2018-2020 (Undergrad); NSF GRFP (2020), Presidential Undergraduate Research Award (PURA) (2019) -> Ph.D. at Georgia Tech w/ Santosh Vempala
- Amaal Abdi, 2020-2021 (High School Intern) -> Undergrad at Wharton, University of Pennsylvania
- Joseph Miano, 2018-2020 (Undergrad); PURA (2019) -> MS in CS, Now at JPMorgan Chase
- Alexis Webber, 2019-2019 (Undergrad); Charles Hancock Award for Neuroengineering Research -> Now at Alpha Omega