Connie Chau, Vaidehi Srinivas, and Yi Yang Selected for EECS Rising Stars Workshop

Northwestern Engineering’s Connie Chau, Vaidehi Srinivas, and Yi Yang attended the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) Rising Stars Workshop 2025, hosted in October by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Boston University.

The EECS Rising Stars program brings together women graduate students, doctoral-level scholars, and postdocs for a two-day intensive workshop focused on navigating the early stages of academic careers in electrical engineering, computer science, and artificial intelligence. Chau, Srinivas, and Yang were among the 70 invited participants out of hundreds of applicants.

The event’s networking and panels—that included frank discussions on leading a research group, fundraising, maintaining work-life balance, and building a mentoring network—inspired and encouraged the Northwestern trio.

Srinivas, a fifth-year PhD student advised by Professor Aravindan Vijayaraghavan in the Northwestern CS Theory Group, appreciated the speakers’ reflections on the inherent uncertainty of the academic job search process.

“It’s very difficult to predict how you will do in the job search, and this makes me nervous,” Srinivas said. “It was comforting to hear from people who navigated the search successfully that they also felt this uncertainty while they were on the market.”

Similarly, Yang valued the guidance to keep an open mind and not to limit yourself when pursuing academic opportunities.

“Several speakers shared that we often underestimate ourselves or make assumptions about what institutions might be looking for, but in reality, we can’t truly know until we try,” said Yang, a research associate in the research groups of Professors Ted Sargent and Mercouri Kanatzidis. “It’s important to give ourselves the chance to explore broadly and stay open to opportunities that we might not have initially considered.”

At the EECS Rising Stars workshop, Chau, Srinivas, and Yang benefitted from connecting with peers who shared similar career aspirations—regardless of how closely their research interests overlap with their own.

“I really enjoyed the opportunity to meet other researchers—students, postdocs, and professors alike—who were also working on interesting and important problems related to computing and society,” said Chau, a fifth-year PhD student in Northwestern's Technology and Social Behavior program and member of Professor Maia Jacobs’s NU-PATH Lab. “It was wonderful to be surrounded by so many brilliant and passionate women in engineering and computer science, and I made some connections with very experienced researchers who I hope to collaborate with in the future.”

Srinivas added, “I had fun getting to know people far outside my research area in algorithms and theoretical computer science—people I wouldn’t normally meet at conferences. My workshop roommate, for example, works in electrical engineering and applied physics designing solar cells, and it was really cool to learn about her research.”

EECS Rising Stars fosters this type of intellectual exchange across fields and cross-pollination of ideas.

“I gained valuable perspectives on interdisciplinary collaboration and how to translate fundamental materials research into system-level applications,” Yang said. “These insights will certainly inform how I design collaborations and plan future projects. I am inspired to think more strategically about how my work can connect with emerging fields such as AI-driven materials discovery and sustainable energy technologies.”

Meet the Rising Stars

Chau’s research uses participatory and community-based design research methods to co-create technologies, especially those that promote positive individual and public health outcomes and improve digital/AI literacy and tech safety within non-technical communities. She received a 2025 Google PhD Fellowship in human-computer interaction (HCI), earned a Best Paper Honorable Mention Award at CHI 2025, and was awarded a Health Equity Scholars Program Scholarship by AcademyHealth.

Srinivas designs new algorithms and provides rigorous theoretical guarantees for machine learning methods, to develop a principled understanding of when these methods work well and why they sometimes fail. She works on provable guarantees for machine learning tasks, particularly in beyond worst-case settings like smoothed analysis, algorithms with prediction, and conformal prediction. In 2023, Srinivas was awarded a Presidential Fellowship, the most prestigious fellowship awarded to graduate students by Northwestern University.

Yang develops stable and efficient perovskite-based optoelectronic devices through material design and interface management, integrating materials synthesis, interface chemistry, and device physics to achieve both high performance and long-term stability. Yang was selected for the 2024 International Institute for Nanotechnology Outstanding Researcher Leader Award and received first place in the poster session at the 2023 Northwestern-Münster Symposium on Smart Materials. Yang has published more than 50 papers, including 18 as first/co-first author. She holds three patents and serves as a reviewer for journals such as Nature Energy and Nature Nanotechnology.