Niveditha (Nivii) Kalavakonda
Niveditha (Nivii) Kalavakonda, advised by Prof. Blake Hannaford, is a Ph.D. candidate in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Washington. Her work leverages robot vision and human–robot interaction for safer surgeon–robot collaboration. Affiliated with the Science, Technology, and Society Studies Department, she earned the Yang Outstanding Doctoral Student Award, Amazon Catalyst Fellowship, and co-founded Women in Computer Vision (WiCV). Host of Talking Robotics, she will join Northeastern University Seattle as Assistant Teaching Professor in Fall 2025.
University of Washington
PhD candidate, Electrical and Computer Engineering Department
Sikha Pentyala
Sikha Pentyala is an incoming postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington’s eScience Institute, focusing on privacy-preserving synthetic genomics data generation. Her research centers on responsible and trustworthy AI. During her Ph.D. at UW Tacoma under Dr. Martine De Cock, she researched on privacy-preserving AI for distributed data silos, explored privacy-fairness, and privacy-explainability in AI. She received the J.P. Morgan Chase Fellowship, Carwein-Andrews Fellowship, and Andrew Fry Innovation Award. She is an active member of WiDS and co-organizes events supporting women in data science and AI.
University of Washington Tacoma
incoming postdoctoral researcher at the UW’s eScience Institute
Hanbin Cho
Hanbin Cho is a PhD student in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at the University of Washington’s Seattle campus. Her research focuses on the development and translation of bidirectional systems to enable clinical investigation of therapeutic closed-loop paradigms for improving treatment of neurological disorders and injury.
Northeastern University
PhD student, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Geetha Sitaraman
Geetha Sitaraman is a PhD student in the School of Engineering and Technology in University of Washington Tacoma. Her research focus is on privacy-preserving machine learning and coming up with novel cryptographic techniques and algorithms to generate high quality synthetic data in distributed and federated architectures that preserves the privacy of individuals. She also works as a Cloud platform architect at The Boeing Company, Seattle.
University of Washington Tacoma
Phd Student, School of Engineering and Technology