Priyanka Nanayakkara

Welcome! I am a postdoctoral associate in computer science at Georgetown University, where I’m working with Professor Elissa Redmiles and Professor Allison McDonald (Boston University). Previously, I was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, hosted by Professor Salil Vadhan and co-hosted by Professor Martin Wattenberg.

My research is in privacy & security and human-computer interaction. Most recently, I’ve been working on eliciting security preferences for participatory AI and investigating downstream impacts of showing users how AI chatbots model them (e.g., in terms of their demographics). I use a mixed-methods approach—pairing quantitative user experiments with qualitative findings—and build tools like interactive visualization interfaces to help end users and practitioners alike strengthen privacy & security of data and models.

I received a joint PhD in computer science and communication from Northwestern University, where I was advised by Professor Jessica Hullman. During my PhD, I was a visiting researcher at Columbia University, a visiting graduate student at Simons Institute, UC Berkeley, and a research intern at Microsoft Research in FATE and SMC. During the 2024-25 academic year, I was a fellow at the Center for Research on Computation and Society (CRCS). I am an MIT EECS Rising Star and UCSD Data Science Rising Star.

I can be reached at priyanka.nanayakkara [at] georgetown.edu.

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