About Me
I am a Master's student in Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University, specializing in Human Language Technology. My research focuses on developing and evaluating Large Language Models for scientific research, particularly in astrophysics.
I'm passionate about bridging the gap between AI capabilities and domain expert needs, working at the intersection of natural language processing, machine learning interpretability, and scientific applications. I'm also interested in AI safety and the social ethics of technology.
Research Interests
Large Language Models • AI Safety and Misalignment • Scientific AI Applications • ML Interpretability • Human-AI Collaboration • NLP Evaluation • Prompt Engineering
Experience
Research Intern
Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian - AstroAI
Conducted research on Multi-Modal LLMs for Astrophysics, focusing on prompt engineering to generate meaningful summaries about astrophysical sources, extracting embedded physical parameters, and applying sparse autoencoders to uncover patterns and relationships between astronomical objects.
Research Participant
Jelinek Summer Workshop & Space Astronomy Summer Program
Developed and evaluated LLM-powered chatbots for astronomy research, deployed in Slack. Created evaluation datasets with expert astronomers and implemented LLM-based relevance scoring systems to assess chatbot response quality.
Data Science Intern
Los Alamos National Laboratory - Omega Technical Services
Collaborated with the industrial engineering team on task scheduling optimization through databases and automation. Utilized MicroStrategy, Excel, SQL, and Python for data analysis and visualization.
Publications
Encoding and Understanding Astrophysical Information in Large Language Model-Generated Summaries
NeurIPS: ML4PS Workshop, 2025 (accepted)
From Queries to Criteria: Understanding How Astronomers Evaluate LLMs
Conference on Language Modeling (COLM), 2025 (accepted)
Designing an Evaluation Framework for Large Language Models in Astronomy Research
ICML: AI4Science Workshop, 2024 (submitted)
Selected Projects
Hotspot Homing Robot
Sept 2024 – May 2025Autonomous mobile robot for detecting and localizing rogue access points in office environments. Integrated wireless signal processing with SLAM navigation systems. Sponsored by RTX.
Solar Panel Mars Rover
Fall 2023Autonomous Mars Rover prototype with solar recharging capabilities. Developed motion control system using Arduino and implemented sun-tracking algorithm for optimal energy collection.
Quantum Computer Simulator
Spring 2022Python-based Quantum Computer simulator leveraging object-oriented programming principles in a collaborative semester-long project.
Get in Touch
Feel free to reach out! I'm always interested in discussing research collaborations or interesting problems at the intersection of AI and science.
kmccor23 [at] jh [dot] edu
kieramccormick6 [at] gmail [dot] com