Roster
Members¶
We are a group of PhD, Master's and undergraduate researchers working on malware analysis and detection, led by Prof. Marcus Botacin.
Principal investigator¶
PhD students¶
Seyyed Ali Ayati¶
PhD student · since Fall 2023
Proactive malware prevention and scalable security analysis, including Windows EDR systems and kernel-mode security. Lead author of the WOOT 2025 paper on acoustic side-channel attacks on keyboards.
Soumyajyoti Dutta¶
PhD student · since 2024
LLM post-training and evaluation, agentic and RAG systems, and applied ML for cyberdefense, including automated threat-detection rule generation.
Mabon Ninan¶
PhD student · since Fall 2024
I work on machine learning and algorithms for cybersecurity.
Visiting PhD students¶
Jorge Pires Correia¶
Visiting PhD student · Federal University of Paraná (UFPR) · since August 2026
Design and implementation of operating systems, with a focus on security. Advised by Marcus Botacin and André Grégio.
Master's students¶
Terms are as recorded by the lab in September 2026.
Current¶
| Name | Role | Term | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ashwin Menon | MSc | ||
| Yash Phatak | MSc, directed studies | Spring 2026 | Earlier: project-based, Fall 2023 to Fall 2025 |
| Sahil Kaushal | MSc thesis | Fall 2026 | Hardware performance counters. Directed studies Spring 2026. |
| Seong Jin Ahn | MSc thesis | Spring 2026 | User fingerprinting |
| Quan Nguyen | MSc thesis | Fall 2026 | Stream-based rule generation |
| Eshan Kelkar | MSc, directed studies | Spring 2026 | |
| Aditya Gourishetty | MSc, directed studies | Spring 2026 |
Graduated¶
| Name | Role | Term | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nhat Nguyen | MSc | Spring 2025 | AutoPYara: A Python/Java Framework for automatic YARA rule generation using semi-supervised clustering. Paper: AutoPYara (ACSAC 2026). |
Previously advised¶
| Name | Role | Term | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bhavan Dondapati | MSc, project-based | Aug 2023 to Spring 2025 | When GANs meet LLMs (TAISAP 2026) |
| Sidharth Anil | MSc, project-based | May 2023 to Jun 2024 | AutoPYara (ACSAC 2026) |
| Akshat Punjabi | MSc, project-based | Oct 2023 to May 2025 | |
| Manoj Reddy Gurram | MSc, project-based | Aug 2023 to Spring 2025 | |
| Richa Sharma | MSc, research alumni | Spring 2025 to Fall 2025 | |
| Ayushri Jain | Directed studies, alumni project | Fall 2024, Spring 2025 | |
| Sumanth Reddy Kota | MSc, directed studies | Fall 2025 | |
| Aditya Rajiv | MSc, research volunteer | Fall 2025 | |
| Snehith Bikumandla | MSc, project-based, alumni project | Aug 2023, Fall 2024 | |
| Anushka Garg | MSc, directed studies | Spring 2024 | |
| Pranav Taukari | MSc, project-based, directed studies | Apr to Jun 2023, Spring 2024 | |
| Parul Damahe | MSc, project-based | Summer 2023 | |
| Sahil Salunkhe | MSc, volunteer project-based | Fall 2023 to Spring 2024 | |
| Mohina Ahmadi | MSc, volunteer summer internship | Summer to Fall 2024 | |
| Gaurangi Sinha | PhD research experience | Fall 2025 |
Undergraduates¶
Current¶
| Name | Role | Term | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Arnav Karekar | BS Computer Science, 3rd year | Spring 2026 to present | Concept drift in Android malware. Supervised by Mabon Ninan and Marcus Botacin. Website · LinkedIn |
| Chinmay Mangalwedhe | Honors research | Spring 2026 | |
| Aaron Thompson | Directed studies; capstone team | Spring 2026 | Capstone (Spring 2026) with Graham Dungan, Karl Farrar and Maxim Mouget; Prof. Botacin is project owner. |
Previously advised¶
| Name | Role | Term | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jayesh Tripathi | Alumni project | Spring to Fall 2024 | Explainable Drift Detection and Early Retrain (DIMVA 2025) |
| John Ammon | Project-based, NSF REU, directed studies | May to Dec 2023, 2024, Spring 2025 | |
| Mitchell Good | Directed studies | Fall 2025 | |
| Samuel Scott | Directed studies | Fall 2025 | |
| Tushar Premanand | Alumni project | Fall 2024 to Spring 2025 | |
| Sushmita Pattanaik | Alumni project | Fall 2024 to Spring 2025 | |
| Rohan Dalvi | Alumni project | Spring to Fall 2024 | |
| Sai Akash Uppala | Alumni project | Fall 2024 | |
| Zach Smith | Undergraduate research course | Spring 2025 | |
| Fady Seha | Undergraduate research course | Spring 2025 | |
| George Demetriou | Halliburton summer internship | Summer 2024 | |
| Shrey Joshi | Halliburton summer internship | Summer 2024 | |
| Mitra Mukherjee | Halliburton summer internship | Summer 2025 | |
| Avinabh Sah | Halliburton summer internship | Summer 2025 |
Alumni and others¶
Undergraduates in Brazil¶
Advised by Prof. Botacin before he joined Texas A&M.
| Name | Institution | Years | Topic and papers |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vitor Falcão da Rocha | UNICAMP | 2016 to 2017 | Anti-forensics and malware anti-analysis |
| Lucas Baganha Galante | UNICAMP | 2017 to 2019 | Linux malware and ML-based detection. Papers: RevEngE, The AV says |
| Giovanni Bertão | UNICAMP | 2017 to 2019 | Large-scale malware repositories. Paper: Application installers |
| Raphael Machinicki | UFPR | 2019 to 2020 | Android apps' operations analysis. Paper: AntiViruses under the Microscope |
| Felipe Duarte Domingues | UFPR / UNICAMP | 2019 to 2021 | Antivirus operations. Paper: AntiViruses under the Microscope |
Visiting researchers and mentees¶
| Name | Role | Term | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hiago Santos | Visiting MSc, USP (Brazil) | Summer 2025 | |
| Shlok Gilda | PhD student, University of Florida | 2024 to present | Open-source software mentoring |
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