I’m a PhD student at UC Berkeley building tools to help engineers understand, evaluate, and debug their generative models.

I also fancy myself an ammeter nail artist and even more amateur historian on the classification of mental disorders.

I am advised by Joey Gonzalez in Sky Computing Lab and Trevor Darrell in the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research lab, and have also tricked many other amazing people (Jacob Steinhardt, Ion Stoica, Serena Yeung-Levy, + many more) into working with me. I am also fortunate to work on Chatbot Arena, a platform for community-driven LLM/VLM evaluations. I have Tourette Syndrome, so please excuse any snorting, squeaking, eye rolling, or other out-of-distribution behavior if you meet me IRL. I wrote an essay on the topic if you would like to learn more, or feel free to ask me questions directly.

Socials

Twitter: @lisabdunlap Threads/Instagram: @lisa_b_dunlap (my insta is exclusively nail art)

I also have a low-budget podcast with my friend Conor Power where we interview academics about their research and PhD life. You can find episodes on Spotify and Youtube. Fair warning it is very much still in its cringe phase.

For undergrads interested in doing research with me, check out my contact page.

Current Masters/Undergraduate Students

Past Students

Karina Le (now at OpenAI)
Clara Mohri (now PhD Student at Harvard)
Han(Paris) Zhang (now MS student at Stanford)
Shreyas Krishnaswamy (now at Anyscale)
Jiezhi(Stephen) Yang (now MS student at Harvard)
Esau Hutcherson (now a PhD student at A&M)
Alyssa Umino (still killing it at Berkeley)

WARNING: viewing on mobile will distort some of the pictures