Brown CS PhD Student Victor Ojewale Joins Inaugural OpenMined Research Fellowship

What the fellowship offers

The OpenMined Research Fellowship supports PhD and predoctoral students. Brown CS says the program provides an unrestricted research stipend, technical mentorship, and access to infrastructure and networking.

The stated goal is to support the next generation of leaders researching how AI can be programmed to use data without breaching privacy. Ojewale is part of the first cohort, which Brown CS describes as committed to preserving privacy in an era of AI.

Ojewale's research focus

At Brown CS, Ojewale works on methods and tools to assess the behavior of LLMs and other autonomous agents in practice. He also analyzes how people interact with these systems, especially in terms of reliance.

Brown CS says this people-centered approach guides his research philosophy of moving LLM evaluations into the hands of the communities that actually use them. His fellowship work is described as a focused development of these broader research goals.

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

What he hopes to contribute

Ojewale said he is looking forward to working with the OpenMined team and the other fellows. In his words: "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."

His PhD advisor, Dean's Professor of Computer Science and Data Science Suresh Venkatasubramanian, described the student's drive in strong terms. "[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," Venkatasubramanian said.

What it means

The fellowship pairs a privacy-focused program with a researcher whose work centers on auditing and evaluating LLMs and AI agents. According to Ojewale, he intends to bring audit trails and community-centered evaluation into discussions about secure, independent oversight of AI systems. The source does not detail specific projects or outputs, so the results of his fellowship period remain to be seen.