Brown CS News

Brown CS PhD student Victor Ojewale is joining an inaugural cohort committed to preserving privacy in an era of AI. Running from September 2026 to February 2027, the OpenMined Research Fellowship supports PhD and predoctoral students with unrestricted research stipend, technical mentorship, and access to infrastructure and networking. The goal? Support the next generation of leaders researching how we can program AI to use data that doesn’t breach our privacy.

“I am excited about the opportunity to work with the team at OpenMined and to collaborate with the other fellows. I hope to bring my work on building infrastructure for audit trails and community-centered evaluation for LLMs and AI agents into the conversation on secure, independent oversight of these systems,” Victor says.

Victor’s intended work with the fellowship is very much a focused development of his greater research goals. With Brown CS, he works on methods and tools to assess the behavior of LLMs and other autonomous agents in practice, and analyzes how people interact with these systems, especially in terms of reliance. This people-centered approach guides his research philosophy to move LLM evaluations into the hands of the communities that actually use them.

Alongside Brown CS, Victor is affiliated with the Center for Tech Responsibility (CNTR) and Data Science Institute (DSI). He has previously received an RLEval Best Paper Award and an IEEE SATML Distinguished Paper Award.

“[Victor] came into the PhD program with a mission to fix how we do LLM evaluations, and every piece of work he's done since then has been in service of that goal,” Victor’s PhD advisor, Dean's Professor of Computer Science and Data Science Suresh Venkatasubramanian, says. “I've been lucky to be along for the ride.”

For more information, click the link that follows to contact Brown CS Communications Manager Jesse C. Polhemus.