Uttam Rao

I’m a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at UVA, where I am advised by Madhav Marathe at the Biocomplexity Institute, and a Graduate Research Associate with the National Security Data and Policy Institute. I am interested in how AI systems, graph-based modeling, and high performance computing can help us understand complex real-world systems.

I enjoy designing end-to-end research pipelines from data ingestion and graph construction to interactive analysis and visualization, and translating them into practical tools for scientific discovery. Currently, I build LLM-enabled agents that construct and reason over large, temporally grounded knowledge graphs to study scientific knowledge diffusion.

I hold an M.S. in Computer Science from Dartmouth College and a B.S. in Computer Science and B.A. in Chinese Language and Literature from the University of Virginia.