Naomi Saphra
Kempner Research Fellow
They/She
Contact Information
Areas I Research:
About
Naomi Saphra is a research fellow at the Kempner Institute at Harvard University. Previously, Saphra earned a PhD from the University of Edinburgh on Training Dynamics of Neural Language Models; worked at NYU, Google, and Facebook; and attended Johns Hopkins and Carnegie Mellon Universities. She has won several awards and scholarships for being the best disabled scientist. Outside of research, she plays roller derby under the name Gaussian Retribution, performs standup comedy, and shepherds disabled programmers into the world of code dictation.
Research Focus
Saphra’s current research focuses on NLP, training dynamics, and interpretability. She is interested in NLP training dynamics: how models learn to encode linguistic patterns or other structure, how random variation and other factors influence learning, and how we can encode useful inductive biases into the training process. She has recently become interested in fish.