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Contacting Dr. Martin

(updated 3/24/2025)

I appreciate your interest in joining the LARA Lab! 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.

My email address can be found on my homepage.

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 send me a generic email about what you’re interested in from the lab’s work. If you tell me that you think a certain paper of mine is interesting, chances are that I might not even work on that project anymore.
  • Don’t ask me to look at your application. If you apply to UMBC and you do relevant work, chances are I will see your application.
  • I’m not interested in your TOEFL/GRE scores or your past grades. 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.

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.

For current/incoming UMBC Masters/Undergrads:

I currently do not have funding for Masters or undergrad students. However, I am open to working on an independent project with you.

I like to get to know students before working with them. To give everyone an equal chance, I will get to know students through the classes that I teach. If you’d like to work with me, please enroll in whatever class I’m 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.

For prospective PhD students:

I am currently not taking on any new PhD students.

Funding

Your time and skills are valuable; you should never work for free. There are, however, some options for times when I don’t have adequate funding for you.

List based off of Dr. Tejas Gokhale’s.