People

Faculty

Mai ElSherief is an Assistant Professor of AI and Social Justice at the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University. She was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech between 2019-2021 and received her Ph.D. from the Department of Computer Science at UC Santa Barbara in 2019.

Mai ElSherief

Doctoral Students

Ananya Malik is a second-year CS PhD student. Prior to starting her PhD, she was a Software Engineer at Amazon and earned her MS in Computer Science at Georgia Tech. Her research lies at the intersection of natural language processing, AI alignment, and AI safety, focusing on designing socially aware and empathetic AI systems and understanding how persona, context, and language cues shape model behavior.

Bangzhao Shu is a second-year CS PhD student. Prior to his PhD, he earned dual master’s degrees from the University of Michigan. His research lies at the intersection of human-centered NLP, AI safety, and alignment, focusing on emotional intelligence in LLMs, mechanistic interpretability, and understanding how models perceive and respond to social and emotional contexts.

Arinjay Singh

Jonathan Zhang

Haotian Zhang

Undergraduate Students

Alumni

Nazanin Sabri is a Computer Science PhD student at the University of California, San Diego, advised by Prof. Mai ElSherief and Prof. Kristen Vaccaro. Her research spans societal computing, computational social science, and NLP for social good, with a focus on online safety, content moderation, and human-centered machine learning.