This page is mostly for students and trainees who are interested in working with me on research. However, there is plenty for undergraduates, masters, practitioners, and industry folks to understand about my work here too.
(!) Before reaching out …
Please refrain from emailing your CV or summaries of my research to me; I will not respond as I get at least four – five of these styles of emails a week (ten at peak season). I will reply if it’s clear you have written your email (without the use of an AI chatbot) to explain how your research skills are a match for my research direction. I will always appreciate an honest, (even imperfect) attempt to grapple with challenging research topics over a grammatically perfect, impersonal summary of them. A PhD is an extensive exercise in training you up to be a researcher with in-depth, expert knowledge on a given topic to (hopefully) work towards addressing real-world problems … so outsourcing your reach out email to a chatbot communicates to me, correctly or incorrectly, that you are not interested in research, learning, or contributing original perspectives.
It’s really dystopian to read hundreds of incorrect summaries of my ‘esteemed’ and ‘inspiring’ research back to me while folks avidly tell me how this ‘deeply resonated with their growing interest in <something-hyperspecific>’. Academics don’t talk to each other like this. We might go ‘I find X interesting because of the implications/impact for Y’ or ‘There’s a lot of buzz around X but not about Y, why do you think that is? Could we spin up a pilot project to explore this?’. Please see my amazing collaborators’ post about what you can do instead; I know you have it in you to write a good email, even if the process is scary.
Are we a good research fit?
If you are a prospective Ph.D. student and you’d like to chat about research fit, please email me and mention that you’ve read this section of my website encouraging you to do this. Generally, I look for students interested in developing new ways to diagnose, respond to, and evaluate if we’re making digital technologies safer for at-risk groups. This means, I’ll be looking for students with interest in contributing to the fields of Human-Computer Interaction and Privacy and Security, so skills in quantitive measurement studies (e.g., pipeline creation, scraping, crawlers), alongside qualitative methods and analyses (e.g., interviews, grounded theory) are a must!
Alongside this, I’m looking for excellent students who are passionate about making a meaningful difference in mitigating many of the harms caused by technical design and deployment. I use an interventionist approach in my research, which means my methods are human-centered and action-oriented, and may involve partnering with community organizations (e.g., ENDGBV, Barnardo’s) or private industry (e.g., Google, Apple, J.P.Morgan Chase) to deploy systems/services. I then dedicate time to advocacy using my findings to bring about real-world change, such as in consumer-facing technologies and legislation to bridge the research-to-practice gap. If making technologies safer for all excites you, please get in touch.
Prospective Ph.D students
If you’re interested in working with me, please apply to New York University’s PhD Computer Science program; this is a combined program across Courant and Tandon. In your application, it’s very important you mention my name as a contact (even if we’ve never spoken) in both the submission form and your statement of purpose/essay; this way your application can find its way to me. Emailing me during this time is not a great way to ensure I see your application – I get swamped with emails at the best of times.
The CS faculty and I will assess your application in the general applicant pool, and consider the strength of your recommendation letters, statement of purpose, grades, and how well you align with both my research interests and those of the PhD program.
Should your application be competitive, I might reach out to you for a further conversation during the submissions cycle. Please note that faculty members cannot individually decide on acceptance for either the MS or PhD program.
Good luck!
What about opportunities for undergrads or masters?
I reserve a small number of slots for advising and guiding undergraduates and masters students on their thesis/dissertation each year. This is entirely dependent on how many mentees I currently have in my lab, if my mentees are looking for another skillset to complement their own, and work capacity. Topic match isn’t a guarantee for us to work together; human-computer interaction and privacy and security are both large fields so please only get in touch if digital safety is something you are really interested in working on.
I give a preference for students who show an interest in research, and to those who are returning students to work with me so that we can foster a long term relationship.
What about other work opportunities?
I tend to prioritize taking interns over the summer due to the time commitment (3+ months) which allows for a greater engagement in a project area and better assimilation into the group.