Prospective Lab Members

Thanks for your interest in working with me! Please read this page before contacting me.

In general, I plan to hire 1-2 PhD students per year, but that may fluctuate year to year. Below I describe some of the attributes I look for in prospective students, and some of my philosophy on what makes for a great PhD and a great advisor-student relationship.

Technical Qualifications

The most important attributes of a successful PhD student are being highly self-motivated, persistent, and curious. I expect students to take ownership of their PhD research, choose projects they are excited about, and see those projects through to completion. Some specific technical background that I expect from students:

• Mathematical maturity. I expect students to have – or build – a solid foundation in linear algebra, optimization, signal processing, probability & statistics, and algorithms & data structures. Students should be comfortable reading (and ultimately writing) papers that involve equations and/or algorithm pseudocode.
• Coding proficiency. I expect students to be comfortable building projects from scratch, as well as building on existing code. I expect most of our projects to use Python (including GPU and autodiff libraries like PyTorch, JAX, and CuPy), but if you are familiar with a lower-level language like CUDA or C++ that is a bonus. I expect students to have – or build – familiarity with version control (git) and ssh command-line tools (e.g. tmux). Lab members are expected to maintain version history on our lab GitHub page, and write code that is clean, modular, and well-documented to allow others (and our future selves) to build on our work.
• Technical communication. I expect students to be able to clearly communicate what they did in their project and why it matters – both in technical writing and in formal and informal oral presentations. A good place to start when “pitching” a new project idea – to me, to a colleague, or in the introduction of your paper – is by answering the first few questions in the Heilmeier catechism.

What to Look for in an Advisor-Student Relationship

• Mutual respect. My job is to help you develop as an independent researcher. Mutual respect includes respecting each other’s time and research interests, and being open to feedback.
• What to expect. At the beginning of the PhD, you might start working on projects I suggest, and/or help a more senior student or postdoc with their project (though if you have ideas you want to work on, please let me know!). Towards the end of the PhD, I expect you to define your own research agenda and pitch project ideas to me rather than the other way around.
• Prioritize finding an advisor you work well with. Consider the questions in this checklist as you search for a PhD advisor. A good fit includes both sufficient alignment/overlap in research interests and compatible advising style and communication style. Funding may also be a constraint.
• Publication expectations. I prioritize high-quality and impactful research, and sometimes that means finding a balance between finishing a project to make a deadline vs. deciding to wait and publish a more comprehensive paper later. A rough target to aim for (at least towards the beginning of your PhD) is one first-author publication per year, though research progress is often nonlinear and you will likely be more productive towards the end of your PhD.

If you are a prospective student not yet at Georgia Tech, please apply to the ECE and/or ML PhD programs and mention my name as a potential advisor in your application. Note that if you apply to the ML PhD, I can only see your application if you list ECE as your home department. Please also consider applying to any fellowship programs you may be eligible for, including NSF graduate and postdoctoral fellowships (for US citizens), industry graduate fellowships, and (for prospective postdocs) the President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship at Georgia Tech.

If you think I might be a good advisor (or postdoc mentor) fit for you, please apply to Georgia Tech (ECE, or ML with ECE as home department) and mention my name in your application. If you are already at Georgia Tech, or you have something to discuss that will not be evident in your application, email me and include the word “voila” as the first word of the subject line of your email. Unfortunately I receive way too many emails, so I apologize if I am not able to respond to all of them.

Advice for PhD Students

• Be persistent. Research takes time, and usually you’ll need to try several ideas that don’t work before you find one that does. You’ll need to commit sufficient time to your research for it to make progress (treat research as your full-time job, especially as your course load decreases).
• Be optimistic. It feels awesome when you have an idea that works. Know that if you are persistent you will get there!
• Be curious. Often in the course of working on a research project you will encounter something unexpected. It might be a bug in your code, or it might be a new phenomenon you have just discovered. Pay attention to weird things, and try to figure out what’s going on. Be open to changing the course of a project, trying something you didn’t originally plan on, and learning new topics/skills as they become relevant to your research.
• Communicate effectively. Plan ahead for meetings, to use time efficiently. If I made suggestions in our previous meetings, have you implemented them? Describe what you did on research since our last meeting – using a mixture of figures, equations, and/or pseudocode, with enough detail that I can interpret your results. What worked and what didn’t work? Do you see any patterns? Did anything unexpected happen? What do you think is the next thing to try? Is there anything blocking you (if you are blocked with several days until our next meeting, message me on slack instead of waiting for the meeting)? Do you have any higher-level (e.g. career advice) questions for me?
• Own your PhD. I am here to guide you in directions I hope will be fruitful, but ultimately it is your PhD and your responsibility to take ownership of your projects and see them through to completion (which usually means publication, code release, etc.). If there’s a direction you want to go, let me know!

I am compiling a list of resources, advice, and expectations for current lab members in this VOILA lab institutional memory document.