I am a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington’s eScience Institute and University of Washington Tacoma focusing on privacy-preserving synthetic genomics data generation. My research interests are broadly in Responsible and Trustworthy Machine Learning.

I earned my PhD in June 2025 with a thesis titled “Enhancing Privacy in AI: Differential Privacy in Multiparty Computation” advised by Dr. Martine De Cock and Dr. Anderson Nascimento in the School of Engineering and Technology at the University of Washington Tacoma. Prior to starting my PhD in 2022, I earned my Masters in Computer Science & Systems from University of Washington Tacoma in 2020 with a thesis on privacy-preserving video classification. I then briefly worked as a Research Intern at MILA under the supervision of Dr. Golnoosh Farnadi. I interned at JPMorgan Chase as an AI Research Associate in Summer 2023 and Summer 2024. I have been awarded 2023 JP Morgan Chase Fellowship to support PhD research on synthetic data generation. Prior to starting at UW Tacoma, I spent a few years in the Nuclear Power Generation industry as an IT Officer after receiving my Bachelors from JawaharLal Nehru Technological University Anantapur in 2009.

• S. Golob, S. Pentyala, A. Maratkhan, M. De Cock. Privacy Vulnerabilities in Marginals-based Synthetic Data , IEEE Secure and Trustworthy Machine Learning Conference , 2025.(Paper)
• S. Pentyala, N. Neophytou, A. Nascimento, M. De Cock, G. Farnadi Privacy-Preserving Group Fairness in Cross-Device Federated Learning , Proceedings of Machine Learning Research (PMLR), 2025. (Paper)
• S. Pentyala, M. Pereira, & M. De Cock (2024). CaPS: Collaborative and Private Synthetic Data Generation from Distributed Sources, Proceedings of the 41st International Conference on Machine Learning, 2024. (Paper)
• J. Vos, S. Pentyala et al. Privacy-Preserving Membership Queries for Federated Anomaly Detection, PoPETS 2024(3), 2024
• J. Sun, S. Pentyala, M. De Cock, G. Farnadi Privacy-Preserving Fair Item Ranking , 45th European Conference on Information Retrieval 2023. (Paper )
• S. Pentyala, R. Dowsley and M. De Cock Privacy-Preserving Video Classification with Convolutional Neural Networks, In Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Machine Learning, PMLR 139, 2021. (HTML, Poster, Talk)
• S. Pentyala, G. Sitaraman, T. Claar, M. De Cock. End to End Collaborative Synthetic Data Generation, AAAI-25 Workshop on Privacy-Preserving Artificial Intelligence, 2025
• T. Claar, S. Golob, S. Pentyala, G. Sitaraman, M. De Cock, J. Banerjee, L. Foschini. Securely Generating Synthetic Genomic Data from Distributed Data Silos, 11th International Workshop on Genome Privacy and Security (GenoPri'24), 2024
• S. Pentyala, D. Melanson, M. De Cock, G. Farnadi PrivFair: a Library for Privacy-Preserving Fairness Auditing, AAAI-22 Workshop on Privacy-Preserving Artificial Intelligence, 2022. (arXiv, PDF, Talk)

• 2023-2024 School of Engineering & Technology’s Outstanding Student Leadership Award
• Carwein-Andrews Endowment for Graduate Programs for the Spring quarter of 2024
• 2023 UPE Executive Council Award by UPE International Honor Society for the Computing and Information Disciplines
• Recipient of 2023 JP Morgan Chase Fellowship to support PhD research on synthetic data generation
• 2023 Andrew and Julie Fry Innovation Award, UW Tacoma
• 2022-2023 School of Engineering & Technology’s Student Justice Equity Diversity & Inclusion Award, UW Tacoma
• 2022-2023 School of Engineering & Technology’s Outstanding Graduate Research Award, UW Tacoma
• Our Team PPMLHuskies won 2nd award in the U.S-U.K. PETs Prize Challenges
• WiML travel award to present work on private and fair federated learning at WiML@NeurIPS 2022
• Carwein-Andrews Endowment award for 2022-2023
• 2021-2022 School of Engineering & Technology’s Outstanding Graduate Research Award, Univeristy of Washington Tacoma. (CERT)
• Winner of Track III of the iDASH2021 secure genome analysis competition. (HTML)
• Gold Medalist at Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University, Anantapur in the Branch of ECM, Class of 2009. (CERT)

• Spring 2025: Research Mentor -- Mary Gates Endowment for Students at UW
• Fall 2024: TA for TCSS 343 (Design and Analysis of Algorithms) and TCSS 555 (Machine Learning)
• Spring 2023: Pre-doctoral Instructor for TCSS 143 (Fundamentals of Object-Oriented Programming)
• Winter 2023: Pre-doctoral Instructor for TCSS 143 (Fundamentals of Object-Oriented Programming)

Talks

• Invited talk on privacy preserving synthetic data generation for NF1 at Children's Tumor Foundation Data Workshop/NF Conference
• Invited talk on private and fair federated learning at UW Bothell
• Invited talk on privacy-preserving Synthetic Data Generation across data silos at NAIRR Annual Meeting, Arlington, VA.
• Invited talk on privacy-preserving AI across data silos at RAISE 2024, UW Seattle
• Invited talk on 2024 WiDS celebration at UW Tacoma
• Invited talk on 2023 WiDS celebration at UW Tacoma

Review Services

• Reviewer for Conferences AAAI (2026), CIKM (2025), ECAI (2023,2024), NeurIPS (2022)
• Reviewer for Journals International Journal of Information Management (2024), IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (2022, 2023, 2024), IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (2022)
• Reviewer for Workshops SyntheticData4ML Workshop@NeurIPS (2023, 2022)

Other Services

• Member of student poster organizing team at ACM Celebration of Cascadia Women in Computing
• Co-organizing the WiDS table at Sisterhood Event at UW SET Tacoma
• Contributed blog posts on Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning Blog Series led by NIST
• Roundtable Lead on Privacy at the Algorithmic Fairness through the Lens of Causality and Privacy (AFCP2022) Workshop, NeurIPS 2022
• Volunteer in Women in Machine Learning @NeurIPS 2022
• Volunteer at ICML 2024