I am an associate professor in the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute (HDSI) and affiliated with the ECE department, the CSE department, the Neurosciences Graduate program and the Institute for Neural Computation at UC San Diego. I am a member of the NSF TRIPODS institute for Emerging CORE Methods in Data Science (EnCORE). I am part of the Neurotheory Network and Pathways 2 AI. Before joining UCSD, I was a Gibbs Assistant Professor in the Applied Math program at Yale University, with Prof. Ronald Coifman's research group. I completed my PhD in Electrical Engineering in 2017 at the Technion under the supervision of Prof. Israel Cohen.
My research interests are Geometric representation learning, learning, Diffusion geometry, Computational neuroscience, Image processing and graph signal processing and Applied harmonic analysis.
News
- Best Paper Runner-Up awarded to Learning Kronecker-Structured Graphs from Smooth Signals at Learning on Graphs Conference 2025!
- Best Paper Runner-Up awarded to Robust Tangent Space Estimation via Laplacian Eigenvector Gradient Orthogonalization at NeurIPS workshop on New Perspectives in Graph Machine Learning! Preprint here.
- Congrats to Sowmya whose abstract on Compositional decoding of neural activity enhances generalization in handwriting BCIs was selected for a Talk at Cosyne 2026!
- Coupled Transformer Autoencoder for Disentangling Multi-Region Neural Latent Dynamics accepted to to ICLR 2026!
Talks and travel - 2025
- SfN, San Diego (Nov 15-18 2025)
- TAG-DS, UC San Diego (Oct 5-6 2024)
- NeurIPS, San Diego (Dec 1-2 2025)
Teaching
- Fall 2025: DSC 40A Theoretical Foundations of Data Science I
- Winter 2026: DSC 120 Signal Processing for Data Analysis
- Winter 2026: DSC 205 Geometry of Data