What I Study

I’m a Ph.D. student in the Human-Aware Planning & Interaction Lab (HAPI) at Colorado State University, advised by Dr. Sarath Sreedharan. My dissertation is focused on AI Safety and Alignment. I was drawn to this area for three reasons: 1) I care about designing systems that are safe and can effectively work with people of all kinds to improve their lives, 2) as AI becomes more capable and our reliance on it grows, I expect new safety problems to emerge, and I believe that we are still far from solving misalignment, and 3) I find the research interesting and important. To address these challenges, I’ve worked on a number of projects exploring goal misalignment/misspecification, model repair, and goal elicitation.

Other Projects

I’m currently part of a grant-funded project called the Native Bee Watch, whose mission is to track bee species across Colorado to support conservation efforts. As part of this work, I’m helping to develop an advanced tutoring system that uses explainable AI, planning, and machine learning methods to teach citizen scientists how to identify hundreds of different bee groups. Beyond this, I’ve worked on an assortment of other projects, including using AI to improve student collaborative learning, improving the SQL generation capabilities of LLMs, and enhancing artificial neural network robustness with fMRI data. The fMRI project was particularly interesting to me because of my deep interest in brain-computer interfaces (BCI). As this technology continues to advance, I believe it will increasingly converge with AI and fundamentally change how we interact with it. This will raise important new questions around safety and alignment that I’d like to explore.

Where I Came From

A lifelong love of mine is basketball, and I once played at the Division II level before eventually working in sports media and consulting. There, I had the opportunity to learn from all sorts of people operating at the highest levels of sport, psychology and academia, which deeply shaped how I see people, teams, and the pressures of high performance. Those experiences really taught me what it means to be a great teammate, what conditions bring people together so they can accomplish great things, and, among many other lessons, why “who you become as a result of the chase is the most important thing” when pursuing whatever success means to you. Eventually, this led me into design and web development, which, beyond being fun projects to work on, gave me new ways to think through and communicate my ideas. Not long after, I began learning about AI and teaching myself to program, and then, as they say, “the rest is history.” Since then, all of this has led to a number of publications, some pretty cool conferences, internships at the Naval Research Lab and IBM Research, and the opportunity to collaborate with some truly talented people, for whom I’m very grateful.