Sajjad Ghiasvand – MS/PhD student in Communications and Signal Processing (CSP)
In Sajjad’s own words – Interviewed during 2026 year
- Hometown: Tehran, Iran
- Previous Degrees: BS, EE, Sharif University of Technology, MS, ECE, UCSB
- Degree Sought from UCSB: 3rd year PhD student
- Advisor / Lab or Group Name: Prof. Ramtin Pedarsani / Prof. Mahnoosh Alizadeh
- ECE Research Area: Communications & Signal Processing
- Hobbies and Interests: Watching movies, Hiking, Soccer
Sajjad’s Research
- Main Area of Research: Machine Learning, Deep Learning
- Research Interests: Personalization of LLMs and VLMs, LLM Post-Training and Fine-Tuning
- Important Conferences: I had posters at International Conference on Learning Representation (ICLR) 2026, and Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) 2025
- Important Awards & Honors: Jack Lin Research Accelerator Fellowship, ECE Department, UCSB, 2024.
- Publications: Sajjad’s Google Scholar
Favorite things about
- Department: Friendly and supportive faculty
- UCSB: Beautiful campus
- Santa Barbara: Eye-catching and stress-relieving, great weather
Sajjad and his research
Tell us about your research: I work on making large language and vision-language models adapt efficiently to individual users and settings. I work on making large language and vision-language models adapt efficiently to individual users and settings. My focus is personalization and efficient fine-tuning, getting strong performance with low-rank, prompt-based, and federated methods instead of expensive full retraining.
Why did you select UCSB and ECE in regard to your research? UCSB's ECE has real strength in machine learning, optimization, and distributed learning, and my advisors' work lined up closely with the problems I wanted to solve. It offered rigorous fundamentals plus the freedom to work on current ML problems.
What do you find rewarding about your research? What keeps me motivated is the constant learning. Every problem pushes me to understand something new, and there's always a deeper question waiting once you solve the one in front of you.
Thoughts on working in a group research environment: Working with Prof.Working with Prof. Ramtin Pedarsani and Mahnoosh Alizadeh has shaped how I think. They give me room to pursue my own directions while keeping me rigorous. A good group makes the hard parts of a PhD easier, since you have people to discuss ideas with and to point out things you might have missed.
UCSB Prides itself on its collaborative atmosphere, give some examples of how you collaborate: Within UCSB I work closely with labmates in the InfoNet Lab, often co-authoring across multiple projects. I also collaborate with other labs at UCSB, bringing together expertise from different groups, and I've collaborated with researchers at UCLA as well, which adds outside perspectives to my work.
Academics at UCSB
Strengths of the graduate program: A lot of flexibility to work on cutting-edge applied problems, with accessible, supportive faculty and a collaborative student culture.A lot of flexibility to work on cutting-edge applied problems, with accessible, supportive faculty and a collaborative student culture.
Favorite course: ECE 594BB Robustness in Machine Learning, taught by Prof. Yao Qin. It introduced me to important research papers that shaped my path.
Describe your Graduate Student Researcher (GSR) and/or Teaching Assistant (TA) experiences: As a GSR in the InfoNet Lab, a typical day is reading recent papers, running experiments, debugging training pipelines, and writing up results, with frequent discussions with my advisors. As a TA I've taught Probabilistic Machine Learning, Stochastic Processes, and Signal Analysis, leading sections and holding office hours, which I find rewarding.
Life as a graduate student
Quality of life as a graduate student and how you balance school, work, social, and family life: Grad school is demanding, but I have a high quality of life here and really enjoy my time. Grad school is demanding, but I have a high quality of life here and really enjoy my time. Santa Barbara makes balance easier, and I stay grounded with hiking, soccer, and spending time with my friends and family.
Tell us about your summer break: This summer I'm a research intern at Higharc working on vision-language models, while continuing my research at UCSB.
Advice to prospective graduate students: Pick a problem you find interesting and advisors whose style fits yours. Both shape your daily experience more than anything else. And be patient: research takes time, and progress often comes slowly before it comes all at once.
Future Plans...
Where will your research take you next and what are your future career goals: I plan to pursue a research position where I can keep building on my work in machine learning and contribute to real-world impact.
