I am always looking for curious, persistent students to join my group at Harvard SEAS. If you are excited about storage systems, databases, or machine learning systems — and especially about their efficiency, scalability, and reliability — please reach out.

What the work feels like#

Systems research rewards a particular temperament: the willingness to read a flame graph for an hour, to distrust your own design until the numbers agree with it, and to find genuine joy in deleting code. You do not need to arrive with all of these. You do need to want them.

The best systems students I know are not the ones with the most background. They are the ones who cannot leave a surprising measurement alone.

What I look for#

  • Evidence you build things. A class project, an open-source contribution, a tool you wrote because you were annoyed — any of these tells me more than a transcript.
  • Comfort with being wrong quickly. Research is a fast sequence of small failures. Students who treat a failed experiment as information, not defeat, thrive.
  • Care about real impact. I value work that runs, that others can use, and that holds up outside the lab.

How to reach me#

If this sounds like you, send me a short email describing a system you have built or a measurement that surprised you, and what you would want to work on. Applicants to the PhD program at Harvard SEAS are welcome to mention my name — but a thoughtful note matters far more than any keyword.