Ph.D. Presentations

The electric grid is essential to modern society, and recent developments such as renewable energy sources (RESs), battery energy storage systems (ESSs), and microgrids (MGs) have necessitated novel computational methods for planning and operations. Machine learning offers a promising lever here, both as an accelerator for and proxy to traditional optimization-based problems. In this thesis, […]

Intracellular symbionts are microorganisms, such as bacteria, that live within host cells. These associations are widespread throughout the invertebrate tree of life, and can perform a diversity of key metabolic, immune-response, or other functions that the host is dependent on for survival or reproduction. Intracellular symbioses allow both the host and the symbiont to occupy […]

Centromeres ensure proper chromosome segregation during cell division, yet the organization and regulation of centromeric chromatin within satellite DNA arrays remain incompletely understood. Here, we leverage the complete diploid human […]

As quantum computing transitions from theory to practice, understanding which algorithms suit near-term devices becomes critical. Current quantum computers are severely constrained by limited qubit counts, short coherence times, and […]

Many genetics pipelines start by aligning sequencing reads to a reference genome. Aligners attempt to find the position in the reference sequence which best matches the read sequence, but this […]

Self-reflection holds significant potential for learning, behavior change, and emotional processing, yet designing technologies that effectively support it remains challenging, particularly when reflection involves difficult experiences such as failure. Most […]

The growing complexity of high-performance computing (HPC) systems poses a fundamental challenge for domain scientists, whose primary objective is to obtain scientifically valid results rather than to optimize resource utilization. Modern leadership-class facilities combine heterogeneous CPUs, GPUs, and specialized accelerators across systems that simultaneously support traditional scientific simulations and AI-driven workloads. This creates a vast, […]

Modern software increasingly relies on distributed systems to provide accessible, scalable, and reliable services. Choreographic programming brings a global perspective to distributed system development: programmers write a single program that describes the behavior of a whole system, and a compiler projects that global description into local programs run by each node. By making distributed control […]

Edge computing and distributed AI systems increasingly operate under heterogeneous resources, dynamic workloads, and frequent failures, requiring both adaptivity and fault tolerance for efficient execution. In heterogeneous edge clusters, nodes differ significantly in CPU throughput, memory capacity, and network bandwidth, while modern distributed GPU clusters supporting agentic LLM inference must recover large amounts of runtime […]