Palak Jain
Palak Jain is a third year PhD student at Boston University. They work with professors Adam Smith, Ran Canetti, and Mayank Varia on Cryptography and Differential Privacy and are interested in the implications of the various ways of defining and applying privacy and security in the real world.
Along with their research interests they’re also passionate about teaching, especially accessibility of teaching, and were awarded the 2021 CS Excellence Award for Teaching at Boston University. Prior to joining their PhD program, they’ve worked on the front end development of an app, headed the play testing of a board game, and completed a graphic design internship at a branding and digital design studio. Palak earned their BA in Mathematics and Computer Science from Reed College in 2018 where they were a licensed nuclear reactor operator at the Reed Research Reactor and participated heavily in the training of new license candidates. They hope to support efforts to increase accessibility and equity in computer science research and also more broadly to have accessibility and identity inform their behaviour in any context in which they are present.