Dhakal receives 2026 Google PhD residency
Aayush Dhakal, a doctoral student in Nathan Jacobs’ lab, will work on building AI-powered platform to modernize electrical grid
Aayush Dhakal, a doctoral student in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering in the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, has been named a recipient of the 2026 Google PhD residency in computer vision.
This six-month PhD residency focuses on pioneering the application of vision-language models to automate the understanding of critical electrical infrastructure and defect detection.
Dhakal will work with Google’s Tapestry, an AI-powered technology platform developed by Google parent company Alphabet's X "moonshot factory," designed to modernize the world's electrical grid. Often described as "Google Maps for electrons," the platform weaves together trillions of data points to create a single, unified model of the energy ecosystem.
A doctoral candidate, Dhakal works in the Multimodal Vision Research Lab led by Nathan Jacobs, WashU’s vice provost for artificial intelligence and professor of computer science & engineering. His research focuses on developing deep learning models to solve vision tasks, including developing novel methods for deepfake detection, representation learning, text-driven geospatial search and related topics. Dhakal earned a master’s in computer science from WashU in 2023.
