Sikha Pentyala
About
Degrees
Biography
Dr. Sikha Pentyala’s research focuses on developing responsible and trustworthy AI. Her research explores privacy-preserving synthetic data generation, auditing AI systems for trustworthiness concerns including privacy, fairness, and transparency, and applying these methods to real-world challenges, particularly in healthcare.
Prior to joining the faculty, she was a Research Scientist at the University of Washington School of Nursing, where she developed AI literacy tools including an AI tutor and responsible AI literacy modules. She was also a Postdoctoral Researcher at the UW eScience Institute and UW Tacoma, where she continued her research on privacy-preserving data generation for genomics. She earned her Ph.D. in Computing and Software Systems from UW Tacoma in 2025, advised by Dr. Martine De Cock and Dr. Anderson Nascimento. During her doctoral training, she completed research internships at the Mila–Québec AI Institute and JPMorgan Chase, and was awarded the 2023 JPMorgan Chase PhD Fellowship for her work on synthetic data generation. Before entering academia, she spent seven years as a Scientific Officer at the Nuclear Power Corporation of India.