Team members
Mohammed Toufikuzzaman - Team leader
Second-year PhD student at Penn State working on Large Language Model security and mechanistic interpretability. Research focuses on analyzing and correcting overrefusal behavior in MoE LLMs and machine unlearning. Holds Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Computer Science from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology.
Tianrong Zhang - Team leader
Fourth-year PhD student of Informatics at Penn State (BS and MS in Computer Science, University of Michigan). Research focuses on LLM trustworthiness, including safety, robustness, and privacy issues in LLM applications. Won LLM red-teaming arenas with jailbreaking methods.
Chaewan Chun
Doctoral candidate in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State. Received bachelor's degrees in computer science (magna cum laude, Schreyer Honors College) and mathematics from Penn State in 2022.
Jason Lucas
PhD candidate in Informatics at Penn State. Research addresses challenges at the intersection of AI, NLP, and security, developing trustworthy AI systems and combating harmful content. Interdisciplinary background in health informatics, epidemiology, and linguistics. Expertise in AI Safety, Adversarial ML, and Multilingual NLP.
Ali Al Lawati
PhD candidate in Informatics at Penn State. Research focuses on improving reasoning in LLMs and VLMs in a secure and trustworthy manner. Brings extensive software engineering background and practical experience developing agents for real-world problems.
Jiaxi Yang
Second-year PhD student in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State. Bachelor's in Software Engineering from Jiangxi University of Finance and Economics; Master's in Computer Science from University of Electronic Science and Technology of China. Research interests: AI trustworthiness, Federated Learning, and Data Valuation.
Tanishka Mali
M.S. cybersecurity student in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State. Bachelor's in Computer Engineering from Pune University (2024). Enjoys participating in CTFs and red/blue team security exercises.
Durva Dev
Second-year master's student studying computer science. Research focuses on privacy-preserving federated learning and robustness against adversarial attacks.
Owen Dransfield
Third-year undergraduate Cybersecurity Analytics and Operations student in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State. Member of Penn State's competitive cybersecurity team participating in Red, Blue, and CTF competitions nationally.
Maguire Younes
Third-year undergraduate Cybersecurity Analytics and Operations student in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State. Member of Penn State's competitive cybersecurity team participating in Red, Blue, and CTF competitions nationally.
Faculty advisor
Dongwon Lee
Full Professor and Interim Head of Department of Privacy and Cybersecurity Informatics in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State. Research focuses on problems at the intersection of cybersecurity and AI.