CV

Education

• Ph.D. in Computational Sciences & Informatics, George Mason University
  (2024 – Present)
  Dissertation focus: agent-based modeling, trust & misinformation, knowledge commons, climate governance

• M.S. in Computer Science, San José State University
  (2020 – 2022)
  Focus: machine learning, network security, graph neural networks

• B.Tech in Computer Science & Engineering, IIIT-Delhi
  (2014 – 2018)
  Focus: data science, computational social science foundations

Research & Work Experience

• Graduate Instructor, George Mason University (2024 – Present)
  Computational Data Science Undergraduate Coursework.

• Graduate Researcher, George Mason University (Summer 2025)
  Ocean Acidification Policy Research using NLP.

• Software Development Engineer, Amazon (2022 – 2024)
  Automation, forecasting, and integration features for Amazon’s grocery fulfillment systems.

• Graduate Researcher, San José State University (2021 – 2022)
  Multiple Team Membership Research at SJSU’s School of Business.

• Teaching Assistant, San José State University (2021 – 2022)
  Computer Science Undergraduate Coursework including: NoSQL DBs, Computer Security, Data Structures and Algorithms.

• Production/MLOps Engineer, VMware (2018 – 2021)
  ML infrastructure, cloud systems, Kubernetes, Spark.

• Research Intern, IBM Research India (2017)
  NLP + fairness research

• Teaching Assistant, IIIT Delhi (2017)
  TA for Perspectives of Knowledge course.

• Social Media Student Coordinator, IIIT-Delhi (2016 – 2017)
  Managed outreach content and digital engagement for university communications; increased student-community participation.

• Rails Girls Summer of Code Fellow, OpenFarm (2016)
  Built community-driven crop knowledge features;
  designed UI and tagging infrastructure; implemented recommendation pipeline in Rails; improved server load & user engagement
  (RGSoC global scholarship recipient)

• Front-end Engineering Intern, Shipsy (2016)
  UI/UX development, performance optimization

Skills

• Computational Modeling: Agent-based models (Mesa, NetLogo), simulation design
• Machine Learning & NLP: Python, PyTorch, BERT pipelines, GNNs
• Data & Policy Analysis: Text mining, topic modeling, geospatial data (ERA5 SST, NetCDF), policy corpora
• Software Engineering: Python, Docker, Git, REST APIs, Jupyter, SQL/NoSQL
• Scientific Writing & Communication: Academic writing, conference presentations, policy briefs

Publications

AgentZero++: Modeling Fear-Based Behavior in Social Systems

Vrinda Malhotra, Jiaman Li, and Nandini Pisupati. AgentZero++: Modeling Fear-Based Behavior in Social Systems. Computational Social Science Society of the Americas (CSSSA), 2025.

A Comparison of Graph Neural Networks for Malware Classification

Vrinda Malhotra, Katerina Potika, and Mark Stamp. A Comparison of Graph Neural Networks for Malware Classification. Journal of Computer Virology and Hacking Techniques, 2023.

Analyze, Detect and Remove Gender Stereotyping from Bollywood Movies

N. Madaan, S. Mehta, T. Agrawaal, V. Malhotra, A. Aggarwal, Y. Gupta, M. Saxena. Analyze, Detect and Remove Gender Stereotyping from Bollywood Movies. FAT* (now ACM FAccT), 2018.

Bollywood Movie Corpus for Text, Images and Videos

N. Madaan, S. Mehta, M. Saxena, A. Aggarwal, T. Agrawaal, V. Malhotra. Bollywood Movie Corpus for Text, Images and Videos. arXiv preprint arXiv:1710.04142, 2017.

Teaching

CDS 101

CDS 102

Service and Leadership

• Rails Girls Summer of Code Fellow (2016)
  Open source contributor supporting women in tech; contributed to OpenFarm project and mentored first-time OSS contributors.

• Coordinator, Literary Society (LitSoc), IIIT-Delhi
  Organized academic and creative events, talks, and student writing initiatives; led team operations and event facilitation.

• Graduate Mentor & Teaching Support
  Guided undergraduate and early MS students in programming, ABM, ML, and research writing; supported assessment and feedback efforts.

• Conference & Tech Community Participation
  Attended Grace Hopper Conference (2021, 2019), KubeCon Barcelona (2019), SRE Summit 2016, promoting diversity, open-source, and cloud engineering practices.

• Women in Computing & Open-Source Advocacy
  Active contributor to diversity initiatives; supported women in tech communities through mentorship and participation in open-source programs.

• Graduate Mentor — guided undergraduate and early-career researchers exploring ABM, NLP, and computational social science