I’m a PhD student at Yale University, advised by Dionysis Kalogerias. I’m also a research intern at Cisco Foundation AI, where I was one of the first hires after Cisco acquired Robust Intelligence. Previously, I was a research intern at Google Research (NYC) in Summer 2024. Before Yale, I earned my bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Bilkent University.
My work focuses on LLMs—especially black-box control: steering models without access to gradients or weights. I also build tools to explain LLM behavior and improve robustness against safety-related failures. I sometimes work on open problems in RL when they connect back to control and reliability.
Mostly I want to understand why these systems fail in the real world—and build methods that fix it in practice, not just on benchmarks.
Areas I work in:
- black-box control of LLMs for safety and alignment
- mechanistic interpretability
- reinforcement learning