I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Virginia. I received my PhD from Purdue University and my Bachelor's degree from Fudan University.

My group studies differential privacy, private machine learning, and synthetic data, with an emphasis on methods that can survive contact with real systems, real users, and real constraints.

I care about research that connects theory to deployment: algorithms with defensible guarantees, systems that remain usable, and evaluations that hold up beyond idealized benchmarks.

I am not recruiting PhD students for Fall 2027. Research opportunities are available for current UVA undergraduate and master's students, and for candidates with OPT work authorization. Please email me if interested.

Projects

DPLab-UVA: our group GitHub organization, collecting shared lab repositories, public code releases, demos, and supporting infrastructure for ongoing privacy projects.

My wife, Xuejun Zhao, is an Assistant Professor in Information Systems and Operations Management at UNC Charlotte.