Naomi Saphra
Assistant Professor of Computing & Data Sciences
Naomi Saphra is an incoming Assistant Professor at BU’s Faculty of Computing and Data Science, to begin in 2026. Until then, she will remain in her current role as a Kempner Research Fellow at Harvard University. Her core agenda focuses on a single goal: to completely and comprehensively understand language model training. This objective combines linguistics, optimization, science of deep learning, interpretability, and behavioral evaluation. She is also interested in each of these component topics on their own. Recently, she has begun collaborating with natural and social scientists to use interpretability to understand scientific discovery models and the world around us. She's becoming particularly interested in fish. Previously, she 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 University. Outside of research, she plays roller derby under the name Gaussian Retribution and performs standup comedy.
Research Interests
- Language modeling
- Interpretability
- Training Dynamics
- Generalization
- AI for Scientific Understanding