Emma Pierson

Emma Pierson is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley, affiliated with the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research Lab (BAIR), Computational Precision Health, and the Center for Human-Compatible AI. She focuses on developing data science and machine learning methods to address issues in healthcare equity and social inequality. Her work includes studies on race adjustments in clinical algorithms, migration patterns, and leveraging LLMs for health equity.

Education: Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University (2020), Master’s in Statistics from the University of Oxford. Prior roles include Assistant Professor at Cornell Tech, Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research, and data scientist at 23andMe and Coursera.

Research Interests: Her research spans fair clinical prediction, sparse autoencoders, health disparities, and algorithmic fairness. Notable projects include the MIGRATE dataset for granular migration analysis and studies on policing disparities.

Awards: NSF CAREER Award, Rhodes Scholarship, Hertz Fellowship, MIT Technology Review 35 Innovators Under 35, and Samsung AI Researcher of the Year. She writes a statistics blog (Obsession with Regression) and contributes to media outlets like The New York Times and FiveThirtyEight.

Labs/Teams: Leads the MIGRATE project, a collaboration to analyze fine-grained migration data. Engages in interdisciplinary work across AI, healthcare, and social science.