John Abascal

I am a fourth-year Computer Science PhD Student at Northeastern University, where I am advised by Jonathan Ullman and Alina Oprea. I completed my B.S. in Pure Mathematics at Florida State University and conducted my undergraduate honors thesis under the guidance of Alec Kercheval and Nathan Crock.

My primary research interest is privacy in deep learning. More broadly, I am interested in both theoretical computer science and applied machine learning, including topics such as differential privacy, adversarial machine learning, and the trustworthiness of machine learning algorithms.

I have also held industry positions in both software engineering and data science at Intuit and NewSci Labs, respectively. During the summers of 2023 and 2024, I was an Applied Research Intern on LinkedIn’s Data Privacy team, where I worked on empirically measuring privacy leakage in analytics and LLMs. This semester, I am a Student Researcher at Google, exploring open problems in machine unlearning 🔒