About Me
Hello everyone, welcome to my website!
My name is Donya, I am a Ph.D. candidate at TTIC (it's a wonderful place to focus on Machine Learning theory at UChicago). My research lies at the intersection of machine learning and theoretical computer science, with a focus on well-defined aspects of safety and trustworthiness in machine learning, including robustness, reliability, and explainability with provable guarantees. I develop algorithmic and statistical frameworks to study these properties.
Humbled by their capabilities, I’ve become increasingly interested in the agentic view of models. I began my Ph.D. research under the kind supervision of the amazing Avrim Blum in March 2024.
I had the pleasure of spending half of the summer 2025 at Carnegie Mellon University, hosted by Andrej Risteski, working on inference-time alignment with imperfect process verifiers, and the other half at Columbia University, hosted by Daniel Hsu, working on the interplay between pre-training and tool use.
From January to May 2026, I was a long-term student participant in the Simons Institute's Federated and Collaborative Learning program, and I have been working with the Google DeepMind Foundations team on post-training methods for uncertainty quantification after. I feel very lucky (and rather spoiled) to have such incredible mentors and collaborators, and I am so so grateful for their never ending support, kindness, patience, and the opportunities they have given me. 🙂
I earned my Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering as well as Computer Engineering from the University of Tehran, Iran. During my undergrad, I interned at Max Planck Institute, Germany, under the supervision of Peter Benner, and the University of Texas at Austin, USA. I had the opportunity to get to know fantastic people from all around the world and learn from them. I was fortunate to work on my Bachelor's Thesis under the supervision of Keshav Pingali from the University of Texas at Austin and was the first (and hopefully not the last) Bachelor's student in my university who has officially done her thesis internationally.
You can find my CV here .
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Publications
Most of my publications have authors ordered alphabetically, indicated by (α–β), as is customary in theoretical computer science.