Stefan Broecker

Hi, I’m Stefan Broecker! I’m currently a PhD Candidate in the Department of Computer Science at UC Davis working under Dr. Thomas Strohmer in the Department of Mathematics. My PhD work sits at the intersection of multimodal machine learning, synthetic data generation, and privacy. Put another way, I’m developing models that can create convincing fake data, particularly in the medical field, while ensuring that the fake data doesn’t compromise the privacy of real individuals.

My path to get here meandered, but roughly:

• I’m currently exploring synthetic data generation and multimodal deep learning as part of my PhD research.
• I recently spent a summer at Okareo, where I focused on synthetic data generation and model evaluation for Large Language Models (LLMs).
• My initial dive into privacy and synthetic data was with the US Census Bureau, where I built differential privacy tools for healthcare data. You can see some of that here.
• Before grad school I worked in Data Science with a particular emphasis on civic tech — an interest that continues to drive my work today.
• And prior to all of that I worked on science and technology policy as part of the University of Virginia’s Policy Internship Program.

If any or all of that sounds interesting to you, reach out! I’m always eager to collaborate on a project or talk about what’s going on in AI, privacy, or tech.