Curriculum Vitae

PhD student at the University of Edinburgh · US & UK dual citizen

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Education

  • Aug. 2023 - Present

    PhD in ILCC: Language Processing, Speech Technology, Information Retrieval, Cognition

    University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK
    • Supervised by Mirella Lapata and Esmeralda S. Whitammer
    • Expected graduation December 2026
  • Aug. 2020 - Dec. 2022

    Master of Science in Computer Science

    Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA
    • Concentration in Machine Learning
  • Aug. 2018 - Dec. 2020

    Bachelor of Science in Computer Science

    Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA
    • Minor in Linguistics

Research Interests

  • Efficient reinforcement learning for long-horizon, unverifiable tasks like long-story generation
  • Credit assignment and reward design for complex agent orchestration

Research Experience

  • Aug. 2023 - Present

    PhD Candidate

    University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK
    • Working on efficient and creative reinforcement learning for long-narrative tasks, code, and deep research
    • Designed a reinforcement learning paradigm for book-chapter generation, published at COLM 2025
  • Dec. 2025 - Present

    Visiting Researcher

    RL for Agentic Reasoning (RLAR), ServiceNow, Atlanta, GA
    • Exploring privacy-augmented deep-research agents
  • Jan. 2020 - May 2023

    Researcher

    Social and Language Technologies Group, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA
    • Investigated the processes and distribution of radicalization on insular social media
    • Analyzed the prevalence of political frames using a dependency-parsing system
  • Aug. 2021 - Sep. 2022

    AI Resident

    ParlAI Team, Meta AI, New York City, NY
    • Improved LLM generalization in predicting text-game world-state changes
  • Jan. 2021 - May 2021

    Machine Learning Graduate Research Assistant

    Electro-Optical Systems Laboratory, Georgia Tech Research Institute, Atlanta, GA
    • Expanded a genetic programming framework's capabilities for images

Work Experience

  • Dec. 2024 - May 2025

    Teaching Assistant

    Foundations of NLP, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK
    • Designed course materials for an undergraduate NLP course
    • Created coding and theory assignments for sentiment analysis and translation
  • Jun. 2021 - Aug. 2021

    Machine Learning Engineer Intern

    Trust & Safety Team, TikTok, Mountain View, CA
    • Designed mixture-of-experts neural architectures to improve region-specific auto-moderation performance
    • Researched multi-task learning loss functions and architectures
    • Deployed models to production and measured performance improvements over time

Publications

  3. [2026]
    Long-Context Reasoning Through Proxy-Based Chain-of-Thought Tuning
    Miao Li ,  Irina Saparina ,  Alexander Gurung , and  Mirella Lapata
    ACL 2026