Profile
Dr. Savannah Thais' research focuses on measurement of and with AI. Drawing on her background in particle physics, she develops systematic approaches to evaluate AI systems in critical areas of science and society. Her work includes designing domain-informed benchmarks, advancing mechanistic interpretability methods, and exploring how AI can be responsibly integrated into scientific discovery. Her research is highly interdisciplinary, and often pulls from diverse fields including physics, philosophy, law, public health, and sociology.
More broadly, Dr. Thais is interested in understanding the societal impacts of emerging technologies and in how we can use AI to help build a more just and equitable future. She is dedicated to academic and public service and currently serves on Panel for Public Affairs of the American Physical Society and the Community Board for her home neighborhood of Bushwick. She was previously a Research Scientist and Adjunct Professor in the Data Science Institute at Columbia University and holds a BS in math and physics from the University of Chicago, a PhD in Physics from Yale, and was a post-doc at the Princeton Institute for Computational Science and Engineering.