Welcome!
We are the Network and Data Science (NDS) lab at Vanderbilt University, led by Tyler Derr. Our research lies in data mining and machine learning, especially deep learning on graphs, social network analysis, and data science for social good with applications such as drug discovery, education, political science, autism research, etc.
We are recruiting PhD students to work with us in the NDS Lab on topics in our general interests (see NDS Lab research interests below). Master’s and undergraduate students within Vanderbilt University and visiting scholars are also welcome. Please see here for position details.
We are grateful to the following for supporting our research:
News
1/2026
Our paper Large Language Models for Conversational User Simulation: A Comprehensive Survey is accepted at EACL'26!
1/2026
Our paper Ensemble Privacy Defense for Knowledge-Intensive LLMs against Membership Inference Attacks is accepted at EACL(Findings)'26!
2025
11/2025
Our paper SAVE-TAG: Semantic-Aware Vicinal Risk Minimization for Long-Tailed Text-Attributed Graphs is accepted at KDD'26!
11/2025
Tyler receives Vanderbilt's Provost Immersion Grant for Faculty!
11/2025
Our paper “Graph2Video: Leveraging Video Models to Model Dynamic Graph Evolution“ is accepted at AAAI'26!
11/2025
Our paper SuperWater as a Generative AI Framework to Predict Water Molecule Positions on Protein Structures is accepted at Communications Chemistry!
11/2025
Preprint Scaffold-Aware Generative Augmentation and Reranking for Enhanced Virtual Screening is now online!
10/2025
Tyler is invited to serve as a member of the IEEE Task Force on Learning for Graphs!
10/2025
Tyler is recognized on the 2025 Stanford/Elsevier list of the World's Top 2% Scientists!
8/2025
Preprint Mitigating Distribution Shift in Graph-Based Android Malware Classification via Function Metadata and LLM Embeddings is now online!
8/2025
Preprint Mitigating Distribution Shift in Graph-Based Android Malware Classification via Function Metadata and LLM Embeddings is now online!
8/2025
Preprint Defining and Benchmarking a Data-Centric Design Space for Brain Graph Construction is now online!
8/2025
Preprint Inverse-LLaVA: Eliminating Alignment Pre-training Through Text-to-Vision Mapping is now online!