Laya Pullela

Email  /  CV  /  Scholar  /  LinkedIn  /  Instagram  /  Github

→

Current

I'm very excited to begin my PhD at the University of Michigan in the ECE department's signal + image processing and machine learning cluster this Fall, 2025! I'm very fortunate to be co-advised by Professors Minji Kim and Laura Balzano. My research focuses on computational graph algorithms and machine learning to understand genomics and biochemical structures.

Previous

I was a joint BS/MS student at UC Santa Barbara in the College of Creative Studies.

At UCSB, I was a research assistant and a ULA. In my second/third year of undergrad, I was an RA at the UCSB Bionic Vision Lab advised by Prof. Michael Beyeler. I was also a research assistant at the Yao Qin Lab in the ECE department at UCSB, where I studied multimodal learning, in particular for healthcare applications.

Research

My interests intersect in machine learning, network science, bioinformatics, and signal processing, particularly for healthcare/medical applications.

Published

Modeling and predicting time courses for patients using prosthetic retinal devices. Used Fourier coefficients to parametrize time courses, beating SOTA models in predictive capabilities by ~30%.

The dataset consists of 11,857 meal descriptions annotated with macro-nutrient labels, including carbohydrates, proteins, fats, and calories. NutriBench can be used to evaluate and benchmark Large Language Models (LLMs) on the task of nutrition estimation.

Medium Articles

Miscellanea

Thank you to Jon Barron for templating this site.