Emma Strubell

Emma Strubell is an Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Language Technologies Institute (LTI) within the School of Computer Science. Their research focuses on efficient and equitable natural language processing (NLP) with the goal of democratizing AI technology for diverse users regardless of computational resources.

Strubell earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UMass Amherst under Andrew McCallum and a B.S. in Computer Science with a math minor from the University of Maine. Previous industry experience includes research scientist roles at Google, Meta (FAIR), and the Allen Institute for AI.

Research centers on computation- and data-efficient NLP methods, including structured prediction, ethical AI frameworks, and domain-specific applications for scientific/legal texts. The work emphasizes reducing environmental impact while improving accessibility, with current projects addressing bias mitigation and sustainability in language models. Strubell actively bridges technical innovation with policy considerations to create socially responsible AI systems.

Recent publications reveal strong trends toward sustainable computing and bias analysis in LLMs, with growing emphasis on real-world applications like climate action planning. The research portfolio demonstrates consistent focus on making NLP technology both environmentally responsible and broadly accessible across socioeconomic contexts.

Strubell has received significant recognition including the Madrona AI Impact Award and dual best paper awards at ACL 2024. In 2024, Business Insider named them among the most powerful people in artificial intelligence.

• Madrona AI Impact Award
• Best Theme Paper at ACL 2024 (OLMo)
• Best Resource Paper at ACL 2024 (Dolma)
• Business Insider: Most Powerful People in AI (2024)

They advise five current Ph.D. students (Jared Fernandez, Jeremiah Milbauer, Clara Na, Nupoor Gandhi, Sireesh Gururaja) and have graduated two alumni now at Google DeepMind and Tencent AI Lab. Major funding includes the NSF Expeditions in Computing award for the Carbon Connect project tackling computational sustainability, alongside industry collaborations focused on efficient model deployment.

Strubell leads the SLAB research group dedicated to democratizing NLP through open-source tools and reproducible science. The lab actively develops frameworks for resource-constrained environments while maintaining rigorous ethical standards, with growing partnerships in climate science and public policy domains.