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 at the intersection of privacy & security and human-computer interaction, with a recent focus on AI privacy, security & safety. Most recently, I’ve been developing a strategy for system designers to elicit data donors’ privacy & security preferences prior to AI training and investigating downstream impacts of showing users how AI chatbots model their demographics. Much of my work uses differential privacy as a case study for recurring challenges around technical complexity, reasoning under uncertainty, and limited agency to meaningfully shape protections. I use a multi-pronged approach, including tool building & evaluation, quantitative user experiments, thematic analyses of text-based observational data, and interview studies with experts and lay audiences alike.

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 held visiting positions at Columbia University, Simons Institute, UC Berkeley, and 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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