Team

I am very fortunate to work with the following students.

Current Team Members

Ph.D. Students

• Homaira Huda Shomee (Fall 2023–present)
  Interests: multimodal learning, graph machine learning.

• Peyman Baghershahi (Fall 2023–present)
  Interests: explainable AI, graph neural networks.

• Dong Cao (Fall 2024–present)
  Interests: efficient AI, distillation, combinatorial problems.

• Angelo Zangari (Spring 2026–present; co-advised with Prof. Xinhua Zhang)
  Interests: combinatorial problems, graph machine learning.

Undergraduate Students

• Omar Uddin (Summer 2025–present)
  Interests: domain-specific LLMs.

Alumni

• Angelo Zangari, M.S. student, graduated Fall 2025.
  Interests: combinatorial problems, graph machine learning.

• Jaspal Jannu, M.S. student, graduated Fall 2024.
  Interests: theoretical machine learning, explainable AI, and machine learning on graphs.
  UIC Outstanding M.S. Thesis Award, AY 2025–26 News

• Pietro Lodi Rizzini, M.S. student, graduated Fall 2024; co-advised with Prof. Zhiling Lan. Interests: HPC, graph machine learning.

• Jaykumar Kakkad, M.S. student, graduated Spring 2024.
  Interests: explainable AI, distillation, and machine learning on graphs.
  UIC Outstanding M.S. Thesis Award, AY 2024–25 News