Shreya Havaldar

Shreya Havaldar

shreyah at seas.upenn.edu

About me

Hello!! I’m Shreya, a 5th year PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania working with Penn NLP. I am advised by Lyle Ungar and Eric Wong. My research is supported by the NSF GRFP. Previously, I attended USC (Fight On!!) where I received a B.S. in Computer Science & Applied Mathematics and worked with Morteza Dehghani at the Morality and Language Lab. I’ve also interned at Google Deepmind and Spotify Research.

I research sociotechnical alignment of LLMs, with a focus on evaluating and mitigating cultural bias. My work looks at how LLMs handle context-dependent phenomena such as implied meaning and social norms, and I have developed frameworks to assess how they represent subjective concepts like politeness, emotion, and individualism. I have also built methods to improve model outputs, including preserving speaker intent in translation and adapting advice to multicultural users.

I’m currently looking for full-time research scientist roles based in NYC!

Beyond my research, I care deeply about representation and accessibility in ML. I founded the UPenn chapter of Women in ML (WiML) in 2023, and I’m currently teaching a new course on designing LLM agents for undergrads at Penn!

I also like to cook, run, and ask strangers if I can pet their dogs. Please reach out if you want to chat about my research, the GRFP, or the PhD application process!

Recent News!!