Here is a list of students I have recently worked with closely and the venues where our work appeared.
We are super excited that Prashant Pandey will be joining our DATA lab in Spring 2025 as faculty. With Prashant's addition to our group, we are actively looking for students with strong background and interest on the intersection between theory and practice of scalable data systems. Please find more details on how to apply to our group on our research opportunities page (https://db.khoury.northeastern.edu/research-opportunities/) and use datalab-apply@khoury.northeastern.edu to reach out so more faculty will see your email.
I personally tend to have a hands-on advising style and prefer to work with a small group of students. The type of research that I am typically excited about tends to challenge what can be done (either just can be done or can be done efficiently) and this type of work needs a lot of background and "excitability". From my experience, a key success factor in research is both overall curiosity and also shared excitement in topics we are going to work on. So for me to admit a new PhD student, I need to see a strong commonality in our research interests and communication style. On communication, please notice I am a big fan of Ray Dalio's principles applied to research (please read that linked excerpt to see how we like to work in my group) and Barbara Minto's Pyramid Principle.
When looking at applicants, I also value strong external validation of future research skills through past well-researched and well-written technical reports, and high placement in international math or science competitions and good results in standardized test scores like GRE or SAT.
Faculty get several emails a week from students asking for university admission to the PhD program or Teaching Assistantships. I copy below my preferred email templates that contain the most relevant information.
Thank you for your email and interest in our research group!
I am currently not admitting new students. But our larger group is always looking for students with strong foundations in one or more of the following areas: data management, algorithms, data structures, logic, theory, systems, visualization & HCI, statistics, optimization, and information theory.
Please find more details on how to apply to our group on our research opportunities page (https://db.khoury.northeastern.edu/research-opportunities/) and my web page (https://gatterbauer.name/students), and use datalab-apply@khoury.northeastern.edu so more faculty will see your email.
Yearly deadline for applying to our PhD program is Dec 15. Admission to the PhD program is determined by a faculty committee with partial input from other faculty.
If you are interested to work with me as PhD student, please make sure that your application contains legible URLs to past projects, project reports, well annotated code, and lesson learned (the central Northeastern application portal tends to remove embedded links from PDF documents, so make sure URLs are typed out). Also mention goals you would like to achieve in your PhD, and how those goals connect to our group. If you have already published reports or papers, please include or link to a paper you are very excited about and explain why you are excited. I personally value strong external validation of future research skills through past well-researched and well-written technical reports, and high placement in international math or science competitions and good results in standardized test scores like GRE. So please make sure to include your GRE or SAT scores (an unofficial copy is ok).
Faculty tend to have particular research interests, expertise, and funding available for specific research projects approved by funding agencies. Since they can add only a limited number of PhD students to their group every year, having research interests of students and faculty aligned is crucial for a successful collaboration. To get a feel for the type of problems I am working on and am excited about, please look through our recent papers, project pages, and our posted videos on Youtube.
You could also attend some of our DATAlab talks. Upcoming talks by guest speakers are often related to what we are interested in. Such talks are a great opportunity for interested students to learn about research we are excited about, see how we interact in our group, and it's also nice for us to get to know you. It's so nice to have students attend who ask the speakers questions: https://db.khoury.northeastern.edu/activities/
Current Northeastern students: Because of the nature of my research, I personally work directly with master or undergraduate students only if there is an *exceptional* overlap in interests with some of our current work and a student already has some working knowledge in those research topics. Thus I tend to refer general emails to this text on my website and usually get more excited about an email along the lines "I saw your work on A. I have been lately thinking about B. Why don't we join forces and work on A+B = C". In case you are already a current or admitted student at Northeastern University (undergraduate, master, or PhD student looking for a new advisor), I strongly recommend students who are interested to work with me to take one of my research-oriented classes. Those are great ways to get introduced to the types of research questions that keep me up at night and the required background knowledge. And it's an excellent way for me to get to know you:
cs7240 (Spring 2026): Principles of scalable data management: https://northeastern-datalab.github.io/cs7240/sp24/calendar.html
cs7840 (Fall 2025): Foundations and Applications of Information Theory https://northeastern-datalab.github.io/cs7840/fa24/calendar.html
We will respond to your email should we see a great match to our current research interests.
Thank you for your email and interest in becoming TA for one of the courses taught in Khoury!
The college has a centralized system for TA opportunities. Please apply via following link and include in your application all information that you think is valuable for the selection process (prior grades, standardized scores, prior TA experience and evaluation, experience with the topics of the class you are applying for): https://admin.khoury.northeastern.edu/students/ta/application/
Make sure that the tab in the upper right corner is set to the correct semester. And please do not contact faculty or stop by their offices, they can see your submitted application material in Khoury admin. Also notice that I won't teach cs3200 in fall 2025.