Neha Makhija

PhD Student

Neha Makhija

What are the specifics of your graduate education (thus far)?

I am a first-year PhD student at the DataLab at Northeastern.

What are your research interests in a bit more detail? Is your current academic/research path what you always had in mind for yourself, or has it evolved somewhat? If so, how/why?

I am currently exploring various aspects of data management such as the challenges involved in handling uncertain, large-scale data. My interest in the field evolved naturally because I’ve always loved to figure out programming challenges, and managing the mind-numbing amount of data being produced today is a really worthwhile challenge. Working in Databases gives me the perfect opportunity to connect abstract ideas with concrete results.

What’s one problem you’d like to solve with your research/work?

I would like to work on solutions that make databases optimized and scalable for different kinds of specialized and general data- so that we can truly take advantage of all the information available to us.

What aspect of what you do is most interesting/fascinating to you? What aspects of your research (findings, angles, problems you’re solving) might surprise others?

There is a lot of elegant theory or smart computational 'tricks' that are completely abstracted away from applications all around us, and I find it fascinating to see the many layers of complexity that databases operate at.

What are your research/career goals, going forward?

I would like to have a career path that allows me to keep researching/ exploring new ideas, but I am still evaluating which particular path will work best for me.

Where did you grow up/spend the most defining years of your childhood/young adulthood?

I grew up in Mumbai!