Kempner Institute Welcomes Undergraduate Student Researchers for Summer 2025
Twelve Harvard undergraduates to undertake intensive summer research on intelligence as part of the KRANIUM program
This year's KRANIUM participants at the program's kick-off event on June 11 at the Kempner Institute in Allston, MA. This summer’s participants include 12 Harvard students at various stages of their undergraduate studies.
Photo credit: Anthony Tulliani
Cambridge, MA—On June 11 the Kempner Institute welcomed its second cohort of undergraduate summer students for the start of KRANIUM, a 10-week intensive summer research program in intelligence for Harvard undergraduates.
This summer’s participants include 12 Harvard students at various stages of their undergraduate studies–from first year students to seniors. Each student is supervised by a Kempner-affiliated faculty member and undertakes an individual research project investigating the foundations of intelligence in natural and artificial systems. This summer’s student projects cover a diverse range of intelligence topics, from developing models for olfactory perception to evaluating large language models (LLMs) for fair and accurate medical diagnosis.
Sponsored by the Kempner Institute as part of the Harvard Summer Undergraduate Research Village (HSURV), KRANIUM (Kempner Research in Artificial & Natural Intelligence for Undergraduates with Mentorship) provides funding, room & board, mentorship, and a host of educational and community programming for participating students.
In addition to the KRANIUM summer program, the Kempner also offers undergraduate research opportunities during the fall and spring semesters through the KURE program. To learn more, visit the undergraduate research programs page on our website.
The full list of Summer 2025 KRANIUM participants, mentors and projects are listed below:
| KRANIUM Student | Faculty Supervisor | Primary Mentor(s) | Project |
| Alex Todoran | Eran Malach | Bingbin Liu | Internalizing Branching Reasoning in Language Models: Toward Implicit and Parallel Exploration |
| Carl Scandelius | Haim Sompolinsky | Shane Shang | Separability Properties of General Perceptual Manifolds |
| Eric Xu | Venkatesh Murthy | Farhad Pashakanloo | Developing Models for Olfactory Perception |
| Gavin Ye | Nada Amin | N/A | Agentic AI for Automated Drug Design |
| Hannah Kim | Binxu Wang | Binxu Wang | Diffusion Models and their Relational Compositions |
| Ian Moore | Susan Murphy | N/A | Non-Interpolated Action Generalization In Meta Reinforcement Learning |
| John Rho | Kiante Brantley | Kiante Brantley | Guided Reinforcement Learning for Robotics Control Tasks |
| Laasya Nagumalli | Naomi Saphra | Naomi Saphra | Nonlinear Feature Interference |
| Simon Ma | Isabel Papadimitriou | Isabel Papadimitriou | Investigating a Phonetic Subspace in Self-Supervised Speech Models |
| Todd Zhou | Mengyu Wang | N/A | Evaluating and Enhancing Large Language Models (LLMs) for Fair and Accurate Medical Image Diagnosis |
| Victoria Chen | Ashley Thomas | Hannah Kim | What’s in a Look? Infant Eye-Gaze and the Role of Collaborative Understanding in Human Intelligence |
| Vincent Song | Samuel Gershman | Christopher Bates | Inducing Meta-Generalisation in Machines |
About the Kempner
The Kempner Institute seeks to understand the basis of intelligence in natural and artificial systems by recruiting and training future generations of researchers to study intelligence from biological, cognitive, engineering, and computational perspectives. Its bold premise is that the fields of natural and artificial intelligence are intimately interconnected; the next generation of artificial intelligence (AI) will require the same principles that our brains use for fast, flexible natural reasoning, and understanding how our brains compute and reason can be elucidated by theories developed for AI. Join the Kempner mailing list to learn more, and to receive updates and news.
