Lydia Zakynthinou is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and a member of the Johns Hopkins Data Science and AI Institute. She works on the theoretical foundations of trustworthy and reliable machine learning and statistics.
Her research focuses on developing privacy-preserving methods—particularly those satisfying the formal definition of differential privacy—and understanding their fundamental limitations. Zakynthinou’s work also explores other dimensions of reliability with surprising connections to privacy, including robustness, generalization, and memorization in learning algorithms. Her goal is to provide safe, principled alternatives that offer formal guarantees as well as competitive performance, empowering data practitioners to adopt trustworthy methods in practice.
Zakynthinou has published research in leading machine learning theory venues such as the Conference on Learning Theory, the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, and the International Conference on Machine Learning, with select papers recognized by spotlight presentations. Her graduate and post-graduate work has been supported by a Meta Research PhD Fellowship, a Northeastern University Khoury College of Computer Sciences PhD Research Award, and a Foundations of Data Science Institute postdoctoral fellowship. Zakynthinou additionally serves on the program committees of multiple conferences in machine learning, security, and privacy, and is a workshop committee member of the Learning Theory Alliance.
She completed her PhD in computer science at Northeastern University, where she was advised by Jonathan Ullman and Huy Lê Nguyễn; her master’s in logic, algorithms, and theory of computation at the National Kapodistrian University of Athens; and her diploma in electrical and computer engineering at the National Technical University of Athens. Before joining Johns Hopkins, Zakynthinou was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at the University of California, Berkeley, hosted by Michael I. Jordan.