Isabel MacGinnitie

I am a PhD student in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, advised by Max Kleiman-Weiner and supported by the NSF CSGrad4US fellowship. I am broadly interested in AI alignment research that promotes humanity’s ability to learn, advance, and flourish in a world with transformative AI. In particular, I’m interested in how AI can assist human cooperation and moral progress, as well as cooperation and morality between AI agents.

Previously, I was a research fellow at Athena, an incredible program for women interested in AI alignment, where I investigated using emojis and filler tokens to obscure chain-of-thought. Before transitioning to research, I was the first hire at RetroRate and a software engineer at Color. I graduated from Harvey Mudd College in 2023 with a BS in computer science and math.

In my free time, I enjoy hiking, photography, and vegan cooking (especially fermentation).