Bio

Prior to starting my PhD, I obtained an MSc in Computer Science from EPFL, Switzerland, and the Diplome d’Ingénieur de l’Ecole Polytechnique (equivalent to a Bachelors and Master’s degree) from Ecole Polytechnique, France. Before my studies at Ecole Polytechnique, I completed two years (MPSI, MP**) of selective post-secondary studies (Classes Préparatoires) at Lycée Louis le Grand, Paris. At Ecole Polytechnique, I studied Pure and Applied Mathematics and Computer Science, and specialized in Data Science. Towards completion of my EPFL MSc degree, I did my Master Thesis in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford under the supervision of Prof. Thomas Lukasiewicz, and in close collaboration with Dr. Oana-Maria Camburu. My research there was on 1) developing deep learning-based approaches to solve the Winograd Schema Challenge and on 2) developing sentence representation models with the goal of improving interpretability and performance on a set of benchmark natural language processing tasks.

In the summer of 2022, I was a research intern in the Microsoft Research Confidential Computing team (Cambridge, UK). I worked on the privacy of machine learning models with Shruti Tople and Daniel Jones. In the summer of 2020, I was a research intern at Twitter (London, UK) in the graph learning team. I worked with Dr. Davide Eynard on the privacy of Twitter graph data. In 2017, I did a summer internship at Google (Boulder, Colorado, USA), in the Payments Compliance Engineering Team, where I was supervised by Craig Wright. In 2016, I did a 5-month internship at Google (Paris, France), where I was supervised by Dr. Sertan Girgin.

I was born and grew up in Romania. There, I participated in many mathematics contests, including the Romanian National Olympiad, where I won one gold medal, three silver medals, and one bronze medal.