Mitchell Hermon

Ph.D. in Computer Science

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Advised by Haohan Wang. Expected 2028. Sloan Scholar and UIUC SURGE Fellow.

B.S. Computer Science, B.S. Statistics, B.A. Mathematics

University of Iowa

Graduated with a 3.82 GPA after research work in machine learning, biomolecular engineering, and human-computer interaction.

Security-Fidelity Tradeoffs: The Hidden Cost of Prompt Injection Defense

Mitchell Hermon, Rahul Gupta, Weitong Ruan, Ekraam Sabir, Haohan Wang
ICML 2026, Spotlight

Paper Code

That’s Deprecated! Understanding, Detecting, and Steering Knowledge Conflicts in Language Models for Code Generation

Jaesung Bae, Cameron Churchwell, Mitchell Hermon, Tsun-An Hsieh, Jocelyn Xu, Yekaterina Yegorova, Mark Hasegawa-Johnson, Heng Ji
arXiv, 2025

Led dataset construction, evaluation, and the steering mitigation.

Paper

Progressive Alignment of Crystals: Reproducible and Efficient Assessment of Crystal Structure Similarity

Aaron J. Nessler, Okimasa Okada, Mitchell J. Hermon, Hiroomi Nagata, Michael J. Schnieders
Journal of Applied Crystallography, 2022

Collected and analyzed PAC results.

Paper

Doctoral Researcher

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

LLM evaluation and agent security, advised by Haohan Wang. Developed and released the SecFid benchmark and Unroll, a VS Code extension for reading agent traces.

Research Assistant

University of Iowa

Built machine learning methods with clinicians for opioid-related risk prediction from electronic health records.

Research Assistant

Computational Biomolecular Engineering Lab, University of Iowa

Evaluated crystal structure similarity algorithms for a study published in the Journal of Applied Crystallography.

Developer and Researcher

Mobile Technology Lab, University of Iowa

Developed an end-to-end deep learning computer vision pipeline to support at-home blood pressure recordings.

Software Development Engineer Intern

Amazon

Built a Java workflow on AWS Lambda, DynamoDB, and SNS to integrate data for a labor-planning tool, with estimated annual savings of $10 million.

Software Development Intern

Bio::Neos, Inc.

Developed a tool to search and filter lab results for the Iowa Institute of Human Genomics.

Teaching Assistant, STAT/CS/IS 107: Data Science Discovery

Fall 2024, Spring 2025, Fall 2025, Spring 2026, Fall 2026

Led labs and office hours for an introductory Python data science course, teaching programming, statistics, and applied data analysis.

Teaching Assistant, CS 416: Data Visualization

Summers 2025 and 2026

Graded assignments and held office hours for a course on chart design, dashboards, and visual reasoning with data.

Sloan Scholar, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Minority Ph.D. Program

Recipient list

UIUC SURGE Fellow

Recipient list

Teachers Ranked as Excellent by Their Students

2024 CITL list2025 CITL list

John and Elsie Mae Ferentz Research Fellow

Collins Aerospace AI/Machine Learning Scholar

Recipient list

Jason and Leslie Weber Emerging Technologies Scholar

2022-23 recipient list2021-22 recipient list

President

Association for Computing Machinery, University of Iowa

Organized technical workshops and the 2023 University of Iowa Computing Conference, which drew over 200 participants.

Undergraduate Representative

Department of Statistics DEI Committee, University of Iowa