Vacancies

🌍 Ph. D. Students

Hello, potential advisee! If you are interested in working with me, I offer you the following routes for reaching out to me!

📧 Emailing - Mandatory

If you want to work with me, ask the following questions yourself:

  • Why are you interested in working with specifically me?
  • I have done a few different types of work. Which one seemed most interesting to you? For that particular work, what are the
    • ➕ strengths,
    • ➖ weaknesses,
    • 🤔 scope for future work/enhancements?
    • 🗒️ I do not expect Ph. D. level critique at this point, but I need to see that you are capable of thinking, understanding, and dissecting my works. After all, you will have to do plenty of that throughout the entire Ph.D.
  • In Security, some people lean more towards breaking (i.e., finding vulnerabilities), some more towards building (i.e., introducing and enhancing defenses against vulnerabilities), and some prefer both! Which one are you, and why?

📜 Then, send me an email answering these questions and attach your CV to it.

👨🏻‍💻 Open Source Software Contributions - Optional

If you think you are savvy with programming, feel free to take a look at the open-source repositories of [frameworks] (usually based on Java and Python) I have built over the years through research. Send a pull request! It can be related to creating new test cases, adding new features, improving or fixing bugs in existing features, and/or even submitting a bug report that may surprise me. If you want to contribute in any other way, go for it! Undergraduate and graduate students who have worked with me in extending existing research frameworks significantly have been acknowledged, e.g., as co-(first)authors with me or by name, in top-tier journal (e.g., [TOPS’21]) and top-tier conference demonstration papers (e.g., [FSE’23], [ICSE’21]).

🕵🏻‍♂️ What I am Looking for in Graduate Students

I am looking for specific aptitudes and factors in my students that will hopefully result in great collaborations.

  • 📖 Interest towards Doing Research: An interest towards original thinking and the hunger for creation is what drives great researchers. A potential student can have additional motivations that drive them, but the primary interest should be towards meaningful research. A great way to show that is to have relevant experience, such as publishing or working in research (and development) teams. I want to stress that while having a publication record that communicates interest towards research is considered attractive, it is nevertheless an additional, optional achievement. Note that if you have publications in predatory conferences/journals, that is a big negative. Bottom line, I do not expect potential students to already have publications, but expect them to be interested in research.
  • 🧩 Pro-activeness, Willing to Learn and Grow: No one, including you and I, knows everything. It also means that we need to keep an open mind when it comes to learning. As your Advisor, my approach is to show the ropes once (or more, depending on the difficulty) so that you can learn. Additionally, I expect my students to learn from all possible sources around them, be it my colleagues, your peers, or external mentors. I expect the interaction with my advised students to be balanced, with healthy debates about ideas and implementations further down the line as my students mature.
  • 🎯 An Affinity towards Excellence: I expect my students to be seekers of excellence, but not perfectionists. To elaborate, if you chase after perfection, we won’t ever be able to finish anything. However, excellence is about pushing a (any) task above and beyond good and then letting go when we are satisfied with it. Any task, be it insignificant or impactful, should show that you care about it and are committed to pursuing excellence.

👨‍🎓 Undergraduate Students

Please send me an email if you are interested in working with me. There are always opportunities for independent studies/capstone projects, and more. Undergraduate students I have mentored before/during my Ph. D. (with my advisors) have published papers with me in top-tier conferences (e.g., [FSE’23], [MobileSoft/ICSE’18]), and received full-funded Ph. D. offers in R1 Universities, such as William & Mary, Purdue University and University of Virginia.