I am a senior research fellow at Northeastern University. In Spring 2026, I will start as an assistant professor in Northeastern’s Khoury College of Computer Sciences. I am interested in the sociotechnical dynamics of modernizing data practices, with a focus on privacy and data access.
I completed my PhD in Computer Science (with a secondary in Science & Technology Studies) at Harvard University, where I was fortunate to be advised by Salil Vadhan and Jonathan Zittrain and work within the OpenDP team. My dissertation investigates the technical, social, and political dimensions of differential privacy. I then had a wonderful postdoc year at Columbia University’s Data Science Institute, advised primarily by Rachel Cummings.
Previously, I was a graduate fellow at the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics and an intern at Microsoft Research’s Social Media Collective mentored by danah boyd. Before that, I played four years of varsity golf at Yale University.
If you are interested in working with me as a PhD student, postdoc, or collaborator, please reach out!
Centering Policy and Practice: Research Gaps around Usable Differential Privacy
with Rachel Cummings
IEEE Conference on Trust Privacy and Security in Intelligent Systems and Applications, 2023.
arXiv | publisher’s version
Dont Look at the Data! How Differential Privacy Reconfigures the Practices of Data Science
with Sophia Song, Audrey Haque, Tania Schlatter, and Salil Vadhan
ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2023
Presented at Theory and Practice of Differential Privacy, 2022.
arXiv | publisher’s version
Differential Perspectives: Epistemic Disconnects Surrounding the US Census Bureau’s Use of Differential Privacy
with danah boyd
Harvard Data Science Review, 2022.
Presented at Privacy Law Scholars Conference, 2022.
SSRN | publisher’s version
177 Huntington Ave, 606
j.sarathy [at] northeastern [dot] edu