Isabel MacGinnitie

I am an incoming 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 interested in technical (building AI models that do what we tell them) and normative (building models that do what is morally right (and often implicitly, choosing what we think is morally right)) AI alignment with a focus on research that promotes humanity’s ability to learn, advance, and flourish in a world with transformative AI.

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.