Neekon Vafa
Scholar in Residence at the Kempner Institute
Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows
About
Neekon Vafa is a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows and a Scholar in Residence at the Kempner Institute. Outside of Harvard, he is a member of the research team at RESI. He recently received his PhD in mathematics from MIT, where he was advised by Vinod Vaikuntanathan and supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. He was a visiting researcher at NTT Research and more recently at the Alignment Research Center (ARC). Before MIT, he was a software engineer at Google (YouTube).
Research Focus
Neekon Vafa is a theoretical computer scientist with interests spanning cryptography, statistics, trustworthy AI, security, safety, and alignment. His PhD research laid the cryptographic foundations for studying computational hardness in algorithmic statistics and its implications for trustworthiness in machine learning, including adversarially robust dimensionality reduction and backdoors in AI models. He is currently interested in the foundations of interpretability, monitoring, and security in open-weight models and beyond.