I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research (IEOR) at Columbia University. I also have a courtesy appointment in the Department of Computer Science, and I am Co-chair of the Cybersecurity Research Center at the Data Science Institute. Before joining Columbia, I was faculty at Georgia Tech in the School Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE), with a courtesy appointment in the School of Computer Science. I got my Ph.D. at Caltech in Computing and Mathematical Sciences, where I was fortunate to be advised by Katrina Ligett, and to spend time as a visiting Ph.D. student at UPenn (with Aaron Roth and Michael Kearns), Hebrew University, Microsoft Research, and the Simons Institute.
My research interests lie broadly in differential privacy, and draw upon an interdisciplinary toolkit that spans machine learning, algorithm design, economics, optimization, statistics, HCI, usable security, and public policy. I am especially interested in the challenges and solutions around the use of theoretical tools for privacy-preserving data analysis in practice.
I’m a recipient of an NSF CAREER award, a DARPA Young Faculty Award, a DARPA Director’s Fellowship, an Early Career Impact Award, a Provost’s Teaching Award, and Best Paper Awards at DISC, CCS, and SaTML. I am the Managing Editor for the Journal of Privacy and Confidentiality. I serve on the ACM U.S. Technology Policy Council, the IEEE Standards Association, and the Future of Privacy Forum’s Advisory Board. I serve on the Independent Census Scientific Advisory Council, and previously served on the Census Scientific Advisory Council. I was previously a Fellow at the Center for Democracy & Technology.
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News
- Aug 2025 – The open-source textbook Differential Privacy in Artificial Intelligence: From Theory to Practice is now available. (I wrote Chapter 17 “Relationships between Differential Privacy and Algorithmic Fairness”)
- Aug 2025 – Congratulations to Tamalika Mukherjee for finishing her postdoc and starting her new position at Max Planck!
- July 2025 – Congratulations to Kevin Yeo for defending his PhD thesis “Cryptographic Data Structures”!
- June 2025 – Our paper “Models Matter: Setting Accurate Privacy Expectations for Local and Central Differential Privacy” was accepted to PETs
- May 2025 – Our papers “Differentially Private Space Efficient Algorithms for Counting Distinct Elements in the Turnstile Model” and “Differential Privacy Under Class Imbalance: Methods and Empirical Insights” were accepted to ICML
- May 2025 – Congratulations to Tingting Ou for defending her PhD thesis “Differential Privacy in Algorithm Design: private bandits, frequency estimation and federated histograms”!
- Apr 2025 – Our blog post on explaining privacy guarantees was published by the CDT
- Apr 2025 – Spring 2025 NYC Privacy Day is hosted at Columbia
- Apr 2025 – I’m PC Co-Chair of DEF CON Crypto and Privacy Village. Please submit your work!
- Mar 2025 – Our Day One Project memo “Increasing Responsible Data Sharing throughout Government” was published
- Mar 2025 – Sumegha Garg and I were featured in the BEATCS for our service organizing TCS+
- Jan 2025 – Our paper “ClusterSC: Advancing Synthetic Control with Donor Clustering for Disaggregate-level Data” was accepted to AISTATS
- Sept 2024 – Jayshree Sarathy began her position as an Assistant Professor at Northeastern University, and Peihan Liu joined Columbia as a Ph.D. student
- Aug 2024 – I was appointed to the Census Scientific Advisory Committee
- Apr 2024 – Our (working) paper “Attaxonomy: Unpacking Differential Privacy Guarantees Against Practical Adversaries” was accepted for a presentation at FORC
- Mar 2024 – I got tenure!
- Jan 2024 – Our paper “Thompson Sampling is Itself Differentially Private” was accepted to AISTATS
- Jan 2024 – Our paper “Advancing Differential Privacy: Where We Are Now and Future Directions for Real-World Deployment” was accepted to HSDR