Annika Schoene

Annika Schoene is a Research Scientist at Northeastern University's Institute of Experiential AI (EAI), working within the AI + Health Team and Responsible AI Practice. She holds additional appointments as Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Health Equity and Social Justice Research, and as Visiting Scientist at MaineHealth and the University of Southampton (UK). She is transitioning to an Assistant Professor role at Bouvé College of Health Science.

Her educational background includes a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Hull (UK), where her doctoral research focused on sentiment/emotion classification in social media and suicide note detection using deep learning and linguistic analysis. Prior to EAI, she completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Manchester's National Centre for Text Mining (NaCTeM).

Dr. Schoene's research specializes in developing Responsible AI frameworks for healthcare applications, with emphasis on large language model (LLM) safety in sensitive domains like mental health. She investigates LLM robustness against jailbreak vulnerabilities and harmful outputs, designing evaluation metrics, guardrails, and value-alignment systems to ensure ethical deployment. Her work bridges technical AI development with policy considerations to mitigate algorithmic harm in clinical settings.

She actively collaborates with interdisciplinary teams across EAI's AI + Health and Responsible AI Practice units, generating peer-reviewed publications featured in press discussions about ethical AI deployment in mental healthcare. Her current projects directly inform non-technical stakeholders and policymakers through evidence-based risk assessment frameworks.