Mentoring Philosophy

I have been fortunate to advise and mentor several undergraduate and graduate students from different backgrounds. An important lesson I learned from advising my mentees is that students typically excel in some unique research skills, and, as a PI, I try to provide them ample opportunities to flourish in those areas while encouraging and helping them bridge the gaps in the parts they need help with. I follow a hands-on approach to advising which helps student overcome the initial barrier to entering new research areas much more quickly and form a solid advisor-advisee relationship! As a final advice to all students interested in research, I would now like to quote the famous French mathematician Henri Poincaré:

"It is through science that we prove, but through intuition that we discover."

Ph.D. Students

We are recruiting 1-2 PhD students starting Fall 2025. If you are a current Ph.D. student in the School of Data Science at UVA and interested in developing trustworthy machine learning frameworks for large-scale models, email Prof. Agarwal directly with a subject line of "Ph.D. Student at UVA" and include a brief description of your past and current research interests and your CV.

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UVA undergraduates, Master's, and affiliates

We are looking for undergraduate and Masters’s students affiliated with UVA.

If you are a Undergraduate student and are excited about doing your thesis on trustworthy machine learning problems, email Prof. Agarwal directly with a subject line of "Undergraduate Thesis Student at UVA" and include a brief description of the topics you are interested to pursue in your thesis and your CV.

If you are a Master's student in the School of Data Science at UVA and want to work for your thesis, email Prof. Agarwal directly with a subject line of "Master's Thesis Student at UVA" and include a brief description of the topics you are interested to pursue in your thesis and your CV.

Internship, Visitors, and Collaborations

We are open to collaborating with students and researchers who are already thinking about research problems related to Trustworthy Machine Learning and related problems in the training, inference, and evaluation pipeline of large-scale models (see the research page). Please send an email to Prof. Agarwal with a subject line of "Interested in Collaboration" along with your CV and a brief description of your research interests. We do expect the collaborating students and researchers to work with our group for at least 5 months and have some basic experience in ML/AI (e.g., coursework, demo projects, online courses, etc.) You do not need to have prior experiences in trustworthy machine learning as Prof. Agarwal believes in ground-up mentoring and lowering the barrier to enter new research areas.