Research Interest

The ideal applicant will have research interests that intersect with my own; see this research overview for more details. While I'm not opposed to working with students that have adjacent interests, there should ideally be a significant overlap in terms of research problems and objectives. If not, you'd probably be better served with another advisor that has more expertise in your target research area.

Why a PhD?

I'm interested in hiring full-time PhD students as research assistants. Research is at least a full-time job, and doing significant work also requires extensive training that simply isn't compatible with a shorter-term degree program such as an M.S. So, you should first be convinced that a PhD is for you!

While there are downsides, a PhD will open doors that would otherwise be closed to you, qualifying you for research-oriented jobs in industry, government, and academia. It will give you the freedom to solve important, big picture problems instead of being mostly market and product-driven. And, a PhD will train you to be an independent researcher that is an expert in your field, someone who can recognize and define a problem, formulate an algorithm or technique or methodology to solve that problem, and rigorously evaluate your solution. That sort of skill-set is valuable almost everywhere.

Practical Skills

"Programming maturity" in the sense of being able to independently write, deploy, and debug code is particularly valuable. This is especially true if those skills are applicable to problem domains relevant to your research interests. Pointing to significant past projects hosted on GitHub is particularly helpful to support your application.

Expertise in program analysis, LLMs, and agentic systems is rated highly in an application.

The Group

The group is part of the Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute and is located close to Back Bay in Boston, MA. The institute has more than 15 faculty members as well as many graduate students, postdocs, and research professors working on different aspects of security and privacy. Since we are located in Boston, there is also a large community of researchers in area to connect with. Boston is renowned for its academic density, hosting more than 100 universities and colleges in the metro area.

Next Steps

If you feel like you'd be a good fit and are up for the challenge of completing a PhD, email me your resume and we can talk.