Current Team Members
Eli Whitehouse
Eli Whitehouse is a doctoral student in the computer science department at the University of Illinois Chicago. He holds undergraduate degrees in mathematics and computer science from Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University in the City of New York. Eli's research is focused on how we can use natural language processing systems to create more expressive, personal, and personalizable interfaces for the many programs that mediate and structure digital interactions between human beings online, today. Eli seeks to utilize methods from reliability-oriented disciplines, such as software verification and formal methods, to better structure and support the interactions of language models.
Gyeongeun Lee
Gyeongeun Lee is a PhD student in the Computer Science department at the University of Illinois Chicago. She focuses on natural language processing applications, particularly the detection and study of empathy through linguistic features such as figurative language expressions. Her diverse interests include mental health, social science, psychology, and beauty/skincare.
Javed Shah
Javed Shah is a doctoral student at the University of Illinois Chicago. He holds an MBA from UC Berkeley and has over twenty years of experience as a product manager in cybersecurity. His doctoral research focuses on leveraging generative AI to strengthen cybersecurity, with an emphasis on zero trust and breach prevention. Javed has also published work on applying machine learning to digital mental health interventions, reflecting his broader interest in building trustworthy AI systems for high-stakes applications.
Pardis Ranjbar
Pardis Ranjbar is a doctoral student in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois Chicago. Her research interests are in detecting self-disclosure and applications of NLP in healthcare.
Rajashree Dahal
Rajashree Dahal is a PhD Student in the computer science department at the University of Illinois Chicago. She received an M.S. degree in Computer Science from the University of Alabama in Huntsville in 2024. After graduation, she worked as a visiting research volunteer at West Virginia University with a research focus on LLM in education and health. Her current research explores biases in biomedical texts and tokenization approaches in healthcare datasets. Rajashree is passionate about leveraging technology to solve real-world problems and continually advancing her skills in Artificial Intelligence and data science.
Souvik Bhattacharya
Souvik Bhattacharya is a doctoral student in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois Chicago. Prior to this, he completed his master's degree (with a thesis) in Computer Science from the University of Illinois Chicago. His research interests are in misinformation detection and in the intersection of language with other modalities.
Usman Shahid
Usman Shahid is a doctoral student in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois Chicago. His research interests are in multimodal machine learning, specifically he is interested in developing methods that improve the transfer of knowledge between modalities (co-learning, cross-modal transfer).
Previously, he has worked on failure point detection in large scale dialogue systems, frame analysis, causal inference, plagiarism & content spam detection, affective image analysis, sentiment analysis, media analytics, event extraction and ICTD.
Graduate Alumni
Mohammad Arvan (Summer 2024)
- Ph.D. Dissertation: Machine Learning and Open Science: On Risks and Challenges
Shahla Farzana (Spring 2024)
- Ph.D. Dissertation: Toward Addressing the Low Resource Task of Dementia Detection through Spontaneous Speech
Ankit Aich (Spring 2024)
- Ph.D. Dissertation: Towards Clinically Improved NLP for Psycholinguistic Understanding
Mina Valizadeh (Spring 2023)
- Ph.D. Dissertation: Identifying Medical Self-Disclosure in Online Platforms
Eleonora Quaranta (Spring 2025)
- M.S. Thesis: Emotion-based Multimodal Music Classifier for Recommender Systems
Calliope Bandera (Fall 2024)
- M.S. Thesis: Empathy Cause Identification: Towards Unveiling Empathetic Triggers in Online Interactions
Sharad Chandakacherla (Fall 2024)
- M.S. Thesis: Exploring Multimodal Emotion Classification and Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction
Souvik Bhattacharya (Spring 2023)
- M.S. Thesis: Towards Understanding the State of Modern Misinformation Detection
Edoardo Stoppa (Fall 2022)
- M.S. Thesis: GraDD: A Graph Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing Approach to Automatic Dementia Detection
Yatri Modi (Spring 2020)
- M.S. Thesis: Towards an Improved Model for Visual Storytelling
Alberto Bellini (Fall 2019)
- M.S. Thesis: Towards Open-Ended VQA Models using Transformers
Flavio Di Palo (Fall 2019)
- M.S. Thesis: Detecting Dementia from Patients’ Conversational Transcripts: A Neural Network Approach
Prospective Team Members
I have completed my 2025 PhD recruitment cycle. I will begin reviewing PhD applications for Fall 2026 in late 2025. If you’re interested in working with my group on a topic pertaining to creative language, multimodal NLP, or healthcare applications, please list me as a potential advisor in your research statement when applying to UIC! This will make it easy for admissions to flag your application for me (and other NLP faculty) to review. Due to email volume and to protect my current bandwidth for existing students, I am unable to review application materials prior to this, and I cannot respond to unsolicited emails with those materials. I’d recommend checking out the requirements here, or emailing our excellent CS staff at cs-grad@uic.edu for more information about how to join UIC’s Department of Computer Science.
What do I look for in applications from prospective PhD students? I’m often asked what I’m looking for in applications from prospective PhD students, and I’m happy to provide additional transparency regarding this! Things that I tend to prioritize most in applications are:
- Research Fit. I’m especially looking for team members with interests and experience that align with my own research agenda, or that fill existing gaps in my research group. My favorite research topics are creative language (for example, processing and understanding metaphor), multimodality (for example, grounded dialogue with robots), and healthcare applications (for example, recognizing cognitive decline from spoken language).
- Communication Skills. Effectively communicating your work and motivations, as evidenced by standardized test scores, other writing samples (e.g., prior publications and/or your statement of purpose), or other media output, is an often-overlooked skillset for advancing your research career, and one that I value highly.
- Creativity and Independence. I like working with people who prefer proposing and pursuing their own ideas, and I prefer that research meetings feel collaborative (where we discuss your ideas and I provide high-level feedback) rather than hierarchical (where I tell you what to do).
I like to work with researchers who genuinely enjoy language and linguistics, and I’m happy to work with people who do not have formal training in computer science, but note that I (and my students) are housed in UIC’s Department of Computer Science. If your undergraduate degree was not in CS, you will be required by the department to take certain undergraduate CS classes upon admission and prior to beginning full graduate-level coursework. You will also be expected to know how to develop code to implement your approaches, use popular machine learning and deep learning libraries to train and evaluate models, and have the requisite systems programming expertise to interact with and debug issues that arise in remote server environments.
Postdoctoral
I do not currently have dedicated funding to support postdoctoral appointments. However, if you are interested in working with me as a postdoctorate through independent funding channels, feel free to reach out with information about your funding source and associated details and I’m happy to discuss this further. I’m also happy to co-develop funding proposals for postdoctoral fellowships (e.g., NSF postdoctoral fellowships) if our research interests are well-aligned.
Graduate
If you’re a current or admitted UIC graduate student, or if you have already submitted your application to UIC’s PhD program, feel free to fill out the following form: https://forms.gle/NtFCvHXvi8gH7Y2h6 and send me an email to let me know you’ve filled it out. I review responses regularly, and will contact you for more information if I have a role that matches your interests. I’m always looking for creative, self-motivated researchers to join my team, but availability of certain positions may be restricted depending on lab capacity or funding needs. Unfortunately, I do not have funding for MS students.
Undergraduate
If you are interested in working with me on a volunteer basis, for course credit, or for a capstone project, feel free to fill out the following form: https://forms.gle/tUQDQtYbhL8t9g118 and send me an email to let me know you’ve filled it out. I enjoy working with undergrads and have worked with many on past or current research projects. Note that I require a minimum time commitment of 10 hours per week for all undergraduate researchers, and availability of these positions may be restricted depending on lab capacity to protect bandwidth for existing advisees.
Visiting
At this time I do not have any short-term positions available for non-UIC students. If you are interested in working with me in a more permanent capacity sometime in the future, please apply to UIC directly and fill out the relevant form listed above once you’ve submitted your application to ensure that you are considered for available positions once you are admitted.