Faculty

Julia Hockenmaier

Lab Director

Research Interest:

E-mail: juliahmr at illinois dot edu

Students

Rajarshi Haldar

Ph.D. Candidate

Research Interest: Natural Language Generation and Evaluation

E-mail: rhaldar2 at illinois dot edu

Risham Sidhu

Ph.D. Candidate

Research Interest: Environment-grounded NLP, Multimodality

E-mail: rsidhu3 at illinois dot edu

Ikhyun Cho

Ph.D. Candidate

Research Interest: Enhancing interpretability of large language models

E-mail: ihcho2 at illinois dot edu

Kulbir Singh Ahluwalia

Ph.D. Candidate (Co-advised by Girish Chowdhary)

Research Interest: Natural language grounding, Field robotics, Robot learning

E-mail: ksa5 at illinois dot edu

Siddarth Madala

Ph.D. Candidate

Research Interest: Embodied AI

E-mail: smadala2 at illinois dot edu

Katya Yegorova

Ph.D. Candidate (Co-advised by Mark Hasegawa-Johnson)

Research Interest: Natural Language and Speech Processing in low-resource scenarios; Mechanistic Interpretability.

E-mail: yay2 at illinois dot edu

Sewoong Lee

Ph.D. Candidate

Research Interest: Mechanistic Interpretability

E-mail: samuel27 at illinois dot edu

Jinu Lee

Ph.D. Candidate

Research Interest: Semantics of reasoning (understanding and evaluating natural language reasoning)

E-mail: jinulee2 at illinois dot edu

Jerry Huang

Ph.D. Student

Research Interest:

E-mail: jerry8 at illinois dot edu

Shashwat Gupta

M.S. Student

Research Interest:

E-mail: sg129 at illinois dot edu

Chirag Rastogi

M.S. Student

Research Interest: Geometric interpretability of language models

E-mail: chirag2 at illinois dot edu

Alumni

Ph.D.

• Adam Davies (2026) - Co-advised with Dr. Chengxiang Zhai, Now at Microsoft
• Marc Canby (2026) - Co-advised with Dr. Tandy Warnow, Now at Amazon
• Prashant Jayannavar (2026)
• Anjali Narayan-Chen (2020) - Now at Amazon
• Alice Lai (2018) - Now at CMU
• Yonatan Bisk (2015) - CMU CS/LTI Assistant Professor
• Micah Hodosh (2015) - Now at A9
• Peter Young (2013) - Now at Google

M.S.

• Amit Athani (2023) - Now at Palantir
• Dhruv Agarwal (2019) - Now at Amazon
• Sidartha Satapathy (2019) - Now at Google
• Sara Schieferstein (2018) - Now at Working Families Party
• Mihika Dave (2018) - Now at Meta
• Chris Cervantes (2017) - Now at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory
• Ryan Musa (2016) - Now at Google

B.S.

• Zijian Yao (Fall 2017)
• Yongjin Kim (Fall 2017)
• Xiaoyan Wang (Fall 2017)
• Zeno Barcutean (Spring 2015)
• Sohan Rao (Spring 2014)
• Hannah Rashkin (Fall 2013)
• Paul Lambert (Spring 2012)
• Yanchuan Sim (Spring 2010)
• Cyrus Rashtchian (Spring/Summer 2010)