Canada CIFAR AI Chair

Serena Wang

Academic Affiliations

Assistant Professor in Computer Science at University of British Columbia

Industry & Research Affiliations

Google Research

Focus

Responsible AI, AI safety, evaluation, machine learning, statistics, economics, robust optimization.

Researching the Societal Impact, Evaluation, and Economics of AI

Serena is an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at UBC. She was Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University hosted by Ariel Procaccia, and completed her PhD at UC Berkeley in 2024 advised by Michael Jordan. Serena’s research focuses on understanding and improving the long term societal impacts of AI by rethinking algorithms and their surrounding incentives and practices. Her recent work concerns evaluation processes for AI systems and beyond, including how to measure safety, how to mitigate gaming, and how to think about representation and fairness. Her interdiscplinary research agenda combines ideas from machine learning, statistics, economics, and the social sciences.

Awards and Highlights

  • Harvard Center for Research on Computation and Society Postdoctoral Fellowship (2024)

  • Apple Scholars in AI/ML PhD Fellowship (2022-2024)

  • NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (2018-2023)