Team

Ambuj Singh

Distinguished Professor

Research interests: network science, machine learning, social networks, and bioinformatics

Ambuj Singh is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, with a part-time appointment in the Biomolecular Science and Engineering Program. He received a B.Tech. degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, and a PhD degree from the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests are broadly in the areas of network science, machine learning, social networks, and bioinformatics. He has published 250 technical papers over his career.

He has led a number of multidisciplinary projects including UCSB’s Information Network Academic Research Center funded by the Army, Interdisciplinary Graduate Education Research and Training (IGERT) program on Network Science funded by the NSF, and the Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) on Network Science of Teams funded by the US Army. Besides the NSF and Army, his research has also been funded by the National Institute of Health and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency.

He is currently on the editorial boards of two journals and has served on program committees of several conferences, workshops, and international meetings. He has graduated approximately 50 PhD, MS, and postdoctoral students over his career, including 30 PhD students.

In the past, he has served as the Department Chair and Associate Dean in the College of Engineering. In other leadership roles, he served on UCSB’s Committee on Academic Personnel for three years, the last year as the Chair, and the Committee on Planning on Budget.

3811 Harold Frank Hall

Callie Sardina

PhD Student in Computer Science

Research interests: reasoning and explainability in graph machine learning

Callie is a PhD student in the Department of Computer Science at UC Santa Barbara. She received her B.S. in Computer Science at Boston College in 2023. Her current interests focus on reasoning and explainability for graph neural network, specifically working with factual and counterfactual methods of explanation for graphs.

Christos Zangos

PhD Student in Computer Science

Research interests: graph machine learning, brain imaging

Christos is a PhD student in the Computer Science department at UC Santa Barbara. His research lies in the intersection of machine learning and neuroscience. Concretely, he’s interested in building robust frameworks for tasks like fMRI to image reconstruction, based on neuro-inspired optimization and transfer learning with manifold analysis. He got his Bachelors and Masters in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Patras in Greece.

Danish Ebadulla

PhD Student in Computer Science

Research interests: neural representation alignment, graph machine learning, computational neuroscience

Danish is a PhD student in the Department of Computer Science at UC Santa Barbara. He received his Bachelors in Computer Science and Engineering from PES University Bangalore in 2022. His research focuses on aligning neural representation spaces to enhance model convergence, robustness, and efficiency.

Ege Demirci

PhD Student in Computer Science

Research interests: machine learning on graphs, network science, causal inference, applied machine learning

Ege is a Computer Science Ph.D. student at UC Santa Barbara. He earned his bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Sabanci University. His research focuses on various applications of graph machine learning on interdisciplinary domains. Previously, he worked on causal inference, social networks, and computational social sciences. He is also interested in graph-based techniques that integrate with large language models.

Eren Polat

PhD Student in Computer Science

Research interests: reasoning and explainability in graph machine learning.

Eren received his B.Sc in Computer Science from Bilkent University in 2023. He is interested in Graph Machine Learning, with a focus on reasoning and explainability for Graph Neural Networks. Previously, he had worked on joint link and flow prediction.

Ruiquan (Eric) Li

PhD Student in Computer Science

Research interests: graph mining, AI4Science, machine learning

Saurabh Sharma

PhD Student in Computer Science

Research interests: network science, machine learning, computer vision

Saurabh is a PhD candidate in the Computer Science department at UC Santa Barbara. Prior to this, he spent two years in MPI-Informatics Saarbruecken and got his Masters in Computer Science from Saarland University. Before that, he was a research assistant at IIT Bombay. Previously, he was working as an analyst in Goldman Sachs Bangalore. He got his Bachelors in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Delhi.

Jackson Sheppard

PhD Student in Physical Chemistry

Research interests: molecular simulations, generative learning for drug discovery, protein-solvent interactions

Jackson is a Physical Chemistry Ph.D student in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UC Santa Barbara in the Joan-Emma Shea Research Group. He obtained his bachelor’s degree in Physics from UC Santa Barbara in 2018 and worked as a controls engineer at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory supporting user experiments and designing motion systems for LCLS instruments from 2018-2021. He then joined the Shea group in the Fall of 2021 and has focused on molecular dynamics simulations of biological systems to probe difficult-to-measure properties.