Kristina Nikolić

ETH Zürich, PhD Student

Kristina Nikolić is a PhD student at the Secure and Private AI (SPY) Lab at ETH Zurich and an ETH AI Center Doctoral Fellow, working on AI safety and security. Her research spans jailbreak attack evaluation and prompt injection defenses, with her current focus on system-level defenses for web and tool-use agents. More broadly, she studies the security vulnerabilities that agents introduce as they become more capable, and — given their probabilistic nature — the deterministic defenses that need to be put in place around them. She is also interested in tracking model behaviors that may be unsafe for the user, such as providing harmful information or exhibiting manipulation and deception. Kristina is pursuing her PhD under the supervision of Prof. Florian Tramèr, with co-supervision by Prof. Martin Vechev. During her doctoral studies, she is also conducting a research internship at Microsoft Research Cambridge on the Security Response Center team, and she previously interned at Google. Before her PhD, she completed an MPhil in Machine Learning and Machine Intelligence at the University of Cambridge and her BSc at the School of Electrical Engineering (ETF), University of Belgrade. She is also an alumna of the Mathematical Grammar School in Belgrade, Serbia, and attended PSIML in 2021.