About Me

I am a second year CS PhD student at Khoury College of Computer Science at Northeastern University in Boston. I am advised by Prof Mai ElSherief.

Before starting my PhD, I was a Software Engineer with the Selection Monitoring and Catalog Systems organization at Amazon in Seattle. Prior to that I was an MS CS student at Georgia Tech. At Georgia Tech, I was advised by Prof Srijan Kumar in the CLAWS Lab. I also dabble as a Research mentor with SimPPL.

Research Interest

I am interested in designing, evaluating, and aligning AI systems to maximize social benefit while minimizing risks. My work sits at the intersection of natural language processing (NLP), AI alignment, AI safety, and the study of online communities, with a focus on how AI can be more empathetic, fair, and socially aware.

🤖👤 AI Safety and Personalization

I study how LLMs can be safer and more aligned with human values. My work examines how personas and context shape model empathy and behavior—across explicit identities like culture, age and gender and implicit cues like dialect. I’m currently exploring how interjections can control models toward safer, aligned outputs with Geodesic Research.

🤖🤝✨ Value Based Alignment

I focus on aligning AI systems with human values, emphasizing emotional safety and empathy. My recent EMNLP Paper shows how user context drives variation in model empathy. I’m developing methods to define what undertakes emotionally-safe behaviour and how to reduce this gap, ensure models express emotionally safe behaviour, and that their responses are consistent, empathetic, and aligned with human expectations.

🤝🌐 Understanding and Analyzing for Social Good Applications

In the past I have explored how AI can support healthier online communities by analyzing misinformation, hate speech reasoning, and identifying dog whistles. My goal is to build tools that make digital spaces safer, more inclusive, and socially aware.

Academic Service and Groups

Groups

• CSG (Computation for Social Good) Lab @ NEU
• Geodesic Research
• MAIA
• SimPPL
• CLAWS

Teaching

• TA for CS 5200: Database Management Systems

• TA for CS 4100: Foundations of AI (Spring 2025) with Prof Chris Amato

• TA for CS 3600: Intro to AI, with Prof James Rehg (Spring 2022) and Prof Mark Reidl (Fall 2022)

Talks

• Slides of my lecture on Advanced Topics in AI

• Presentation and Slides at SafeGenAI workship at NeurIPS on Who Speaks Matters: Analysing the Influence of the Speaker’s Ethnicity on Hate Classification