Join the Lab

Before you email

Email Wajih Ul Hassan at hassan@virginia.edu. Write your email yourself, in your own words. Do not use ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or any other AI tool to draft, rewrite, or polish it. A short email with a few typos tells us more about you than a fluent one written by a model.

PhD applicants

Apply to the PhD program in Computer Science at UVA and name Wajih Ul Hassan as a faculty member of interest. The department decides admission, so the application itself matters more than any email beforehand. Our students build working systems and evaluate them on real attack data, so the most useful preparation is experience with systems programming, Linux internals, or machine learning applied to security. If you do write before applying, put [DART] in the subject line and say in a few sentences which of our recent papers you would extend, and how.

UVA undergraduates

Undergraduates join our projects for a senior thesis (CS 4980) or through the Distinguished Major Program, and several have won funding of their own: the SEAS Dean’s Undergraduate Engineering Research Fellowship, a SPAR research fellowship, and CRA support to travel and present their work. To ask about a position, email a short note with your transcript, the systems or security courses you have taken, and which of our research areas interests you.

Visiting students

We host undergraduates each summer through the UVA Leadership Alliance First-Year Research Experience (FYRE) program, in 2024, 2025, and 2026 so far. We have also hosted a visiting PhD student from KIT in Germany and a high school student from Thomas Jefferson High School. Visitors work on an active lab project. To ask about a visit, email your research interests, relevant experience, and proposed dates. Past visitors are listed on our team page.