Prospective Graduate Students

Prospective Graduate Students

I am always interested in recruiting and working with smart, creative, hard-working graduate students.
Admission to the UCLA Computer Science department is done at the department level, not by individual faculty members. Hence, you must go through the official process of applying for graduate studies in our department.

PhD Applicants

Admission to our PhD program is quite competitive. In most cases, students admitted to the PhD program have some prior research (project) experience and at least one strong recommendation letter from a faculty member who supervised that research.

Please look through some of my publications and the titles of the courses I teach to understand the type of research that I do. The focus is on systems and networking. This includes computer architecture, operating systems, virtualization, some areas of networking. Topics I work on are often in the context of parallel and distributed systems and/or highly dependable systems. More recently, I am also working in the area of network design automation. All this work typically involves implementation, simulation, and measurements. If your main research interests are not in the areas described in this paragraph, there is no point in contacting me.

Our application form requires you to list "preferred advisors". If, after reading the previous paragraphs, you plan to list me as the first "preferred advisor", it would be best if you contact me via email before you submit your application.

MS Applicants

Please contact me via email only if: 1) you are confident that your focus in your graduate studies will match my research interests, as described in the paragraph above for PhD applicants; and 2) you already have research or practical experience in one of these areas. Note that incoming MS students do not receive financial support. If you are not sure about your interests and/or do not have experience in my area beyond coursework, I'll be happy to talk with you once you are already at UCLA.