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Join the LARA Lab

Joining the Lab

(updated 10/21/2026)

I appreciate your interest in joining the LARA Lab!

For prospective PhD students:

I am not taking on any new PhD students.

For current/incoming UMBC Masters/Undergrads:

I currently do not have funding for Masters or undergrad students. However, I am open to discussing your interests and if there is a fit with the lab. At this point, this probably means that you will not work with me directly, but with a PhD student of mine.

I like to get to know students before working with them. The best way to do this is by taking a class that I am teaching. If you can’t get into the class and you have done previous work related to NLP, you can request to join my weekly lab meeting where we talk about current projects and sometimes go over papers together.

Contacting Dr. Martin

My email address can be found on my homepage. I get a lot of email, so if you send me an email, I probably won’t respond. That said, if you really really want to contact me, here are some tips for increasing your chances of me responding.

Please also keep in mind the other amazing AI faculty at UMBC.

What NOT to do:

  • Please do not call me Mam/Ma’am. It does not match my gender identity and makes me very uncomfortable. Stick to Dr. Martin, Professor Martin, or even just Lara.
  • Please do not email me about the lab’s work. I know what we did, and I’m not interested in folks who are trying to suck up. I’m more interested in what you’ve done.
  • Please do not single out a paper from the lab unless it is tied to your work. I’m not particularly interested in hearing if you find a certain paper of ours inspiring or that we can extend it in a certain way. Chances are that we might not even work on that project anymore. Instead, when reaching out to faculty, it’s better to tie your interests to ours.
  • Please do not ask me to look at your application. If you apply to UMBC and you do relevant work, chances are I will see your application anyway.
  • Please do not share your TOEFL/GRE scores or your past grades/GPA. While they (along with the other components of your application) are looked at in your application to the school, they don’t tell me much about how you will do with research. Save them for the application itself.

What to do:

  • Ask specific questions. If you want to pick my brain about something you’ve been thinking about and you think I might know the answer, feel free to ask!
  • Tell me what you want to do. I can usually connect the dots to figure out if there’s a relevant interest to us both.
  • If you do want to tell me about your education, let me know if you’ve taken any classes that might be relevant to the research I do (e.g., an AI or NLP course) or if you’ve done any related projects.
  • Email me if you have applied to UMBC this cycle and want me to know.
  • If you are a current student and would like to join the weekly LARA Lab meetings, let me know.