PhD student Yaman Yu has been named a recipient of the 2025 Google PhD Fellowship in Privacy, Safety, and Security. The fellowship program recognizes outstanding graduate students who are conducting exceptional and innovative research in computer science and related fields, with a special focus on candidates who seek to influence the future of technology. Google PhD fellowships include tuition and fees, a stipend, and mentorship from a Google Research Mentor for up to two years. Google.org is providing over $10 million to support 255 PhD students across 35 countries and 12 research domains.
Yu's research bridges cybersecurity and human-computer interaction (HCI), focusing on safeguarding AI systems and mitigating harms from AI misuse, particularly for vulnerable populations. Her primary project tackles generative AI safety for youth. She developed the first youth–AI risk taxonomy (YAIR) and benchmark from real-world and synthetic data and used the benchmark to train a new, more effective AI guardrail model for youth (YouthSafe). Yu is now building YouthSafeAgent, a collaborative safety platform that helps parents and teens navigate these new technologies together safely.
"My research is perfectly aligned with Google's mission to build safe, secure, and trustworthy AI," said Yu. "My work focuses on human-centered AI safety for at-risk populations, especially youth. Google is a world leader in this space, and I am excited by the chance to connect with their researchers. This fellowship is a unique opportunity to get feedback from and collaborate with experts who are tackling these exact challenges at a global scale."
Yu's work has been published in top security, privacy, and HCI conferences, including the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P), the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), and the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI). She has received MIT EECS Rising Star, a Best Paper Honorable Mention at CHI, and was part of the eighth-place winning team at the Berkeley LLM Agent Hackathon, while her research has been featured in media outlets such as MIT Technology Review and Business Insider.
"The student nominations we received this year were exemplary in their quality, but Yaman especially stood out and was endorsed by the research scientists and distinguished engineers within Google who participated in the review," said the Google PhD Fellowship Team.
"I'm very proud that Yaman won the Google PhD Fellowship," said Professor Yang Wang, her PhD advisor. "It speaks volumes about her high-quality research on youth–AI safety, a timely topic with great societal importance. A key to Yaman's success is her human-centered approach, something that the iSchool promotes and nurtures. Yaman has set a good example, and I think more iSchool students will win such awards in the future."
Yu is currently on the academic job market for Fall 2026, with a goal of securing a tenure-track faculty position in an information sciences or computer science school.
"I want to build a research lab focused on pioneering human-centered safety for emerging technologies, where I can collaborate with other faculty and mentor the next generation of researchers," she said.