Sikha Pentyala
I am a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington eScience Institute and University of Washington Tacoma, focusing on privacy-preserving synthetic genomics data generation. My research interests are broadly in Responsible and Trustworthy AI.
I earned my Ph.D. in Computer Science 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 UW Tacoma. Prior to my PhD, I earned my M.S. in Computer Science & Systems from UW Tacoma (2020), with a thesis on privacy-preserving video classification.
I interned at Mila – Québec AI Institute as Research Intern (Fall 2021 - Winter 2022 and Summer 2022) under Dr. Golnoosh Farnadi. I also interned at JPMorgan Chase as an AI Research Associate (Summer 2023 and Summer 2024), and was awarded the 2023 JP Morgan Chase PhD Fellowship for my research on synthetic data generation. Before joining UW Tacoma, I spent 7 years in the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Ltd in the role of Scientific Officer, following my Bachelor's degree (Gold Medalist) from Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University Anantapur in 2009.
News
Research Directions
My research builds toward Responsible and Trustworthy AI — work spans four directions:
- Synthetic Data & Digital Twins — generating privacy-preserving (tabular) synthetic datasets, longitudinal synthetic datasets, multimodal synthetic datasets, and constructing digital twins for simulation and analysis
- Trustworthy & Responsible AI — auditing and advancing AI systems across the pillars of trustworthiness: fairness, privacy, robustness, and transparency
- Privacy & Context — grounding privacy and fairness guarantees in social and situational context; bridging formal methods with human norms, with growing emphasis on agentic AI systems where contextual boundaries are dynamic
- AI for Good — applying AI to high-impact domains including healthcare (clinical NLP, synthetic data, digital twins) and education (LLM-assisted learning and personalization)
Selected Publications
Full publication list → includes + 2 patents · publications in SatML, ECIR, PoPETS, PLOS · 10+ workshops at NeurIPS, AAAI, ICAIF, ISMB ·