Hey there, I am Chandra!

Third-year CS PhD student in the theory group of University of Southern California under the advisement of Prof. Jiapeng Zhang.

My broad areas of research are theoretical computer science and unsupervised learning, with a keen interest in random matrix theory and manifold learning.

In the first two years of PhD, I primarily focused on spectral algorithms and their ability to solve fundamental models of graph clustering, such as community detection in the stochastic block model (SBM), as well as understanding their ability to analyze biological data. See publications for more details!

Currently, I am exploring the domains of manifold learning and denoising and downstream applications, such as visualization, both from a theoretical and an applied standpoint. Hit me up if you are interested in these topics!

Teaching

Besides my research, teaching is my favorite aspect of pursuing a PhD. I have had the opportunity to TA for various courses during my time at USC, as well as take part in K-12 outreach and REU (more details in teaching). I look forward to teaching a full course at some point in the near future.