Kiera McCormick
Hi! My name is Kiera McCormick, and I am a Master’s student in Computer Science at the Johns Hopkins University with a concentration in Human Language Technology. I recently graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Science and Engineering in May from Loyola University Maryland. My degree specialized in Electrical and Computer Engineering with a minor in Mathematics. I was also involved with the Women’s Club Lacrosse team, the Loyola Honors Program, Physics tutoring and TAing, leading the Society of Women Engineers, the Haig Scholars program, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and more. I was recently a finalist for the Choudhury Sarkar-Dey Medal and an academic all-American in the Women’s Club Lacrosse Organization. My research and work focuses on the development of Large Language Models for higher scientific research, human and AI comparison and cooperation on Natural Language Processing tasks, advancing open-source science, prompt engineering, evaluating human-computer interactions, question-answer chatbot applications, and more. I am also interested in exploring the possibilities of machine learning for interdisciplinary fields, and machine translation. Please view my CV here!
Contact Information
- 📧 Email: kmccor23 [at] jh [dot] edu // kieramccormick6 [at] gmail [dot] com
- 🐱 GitHub
- ⭐ Google Scholar
Experience
This summer, I am working at the Center for Astrophysics Harvard & Smithsonian with AstroAI on Multi-Modal LLMs for Astrophysics. My specific research within this project focuses on prompt engineering, such as creating the best possible prompts to get the most discriminative physical information about ObsIDs listed in the Chandra Source Catalog and SIMBAD, and astronomer validation of LLM-generated summaries through a standard protocol and web interface.
Last summer, I participated in the Annual Frederick Jelinek Memorial Summer Workshop and the Space Astronomy Summer Program led by John Wu at the Johns Hopkins University and the Space Telescope Science Institute. The goal of this project was to develop and evaluate the role of Large Language Model chatbots within astronomy research. I worked on developing the best possible LLM-powered chatbots to be hosted and deployed in Slack, concentrating on prompt engineering, open/closed source model comparisons, and more. I also worked on evaluating the quality of these chatbot responses by creating a dataset of “Gold Answers” by expert astronomers, and using LLMs to compare and assign relevance scores between the generated response and the “Gold Answer” response as well as other applications.
Previously, I completed an internship at Omega Technical Services at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the summer of 2023. I collaborated with the industrial engineering team, focusing on task scheduling optimization through databases and automation, along with interpreting and drawing insights from given data. I also utilized database coding and conducted data analysis using tools such as MicroStrategy, Excel, SQL, Python, and Confluence, contributing to the creation of metrics and dashboards for effective data visualization.
Publications
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From Queries to Criteria: Understanding How Astronomers Evaluate LLMs McCormick, K., Hyk, A., Zhong, M., Ciucă, I., et al., 2025, COLM, accepted.
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Designing an Evaluation Framework for Large Language Models in Astronomy Research Wu, J. F., Hyk, A., McCormick, K., Ye, C., et al., 2024, ICML: AI4Science workshop, submitted, arXiv:2405.20389.
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pathfinder: A Semantic Framework for Literature Review and Knowledge Discovery in Astronomy Iyer, K. G., Yunus, M., O’Neill, C., Ye, C., Hyk, A., McCormick, K., et al., 2024, ApJS 275 38, arXiv:2408.01556.
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Real-World Evaluations of LLMs for Astronomy Research McCormick, K., Hyk, A., Wu, J. F., 2024, NeurIPS: EvalEval workshop, submitted.
Projects
Quantum Computer Simulator (Spring 2022)
- Engineered a Quantum Computer simulator in Python, leveraging object-oriented programming principles in a semester-long collaborative project.
Solar Panel Mars Rover (Fall 2023)
- Collaborated in a four-person team to design and construct an autonomous Mars Rover prototype with innovative solar recharging capabilities. Spearheaded the development of the rover’s motion control system using Arduino programming, optimizing mobility and navigation. Engineered a power conversion system to efficiently utilize solar energy for autonomous recharging. Implemented an advanced sun-tracking algorithm for the solar panel, maximizing energy collection in variable conditions.
Hotspot Homing Robot (September 2024 – May 2025)
- Developed an autonomous mobile robot designed to detect and localize rogue access points in office environments, sponsored and mentored by members of the Applied Signal Technology sector at RTX. Created and integrated wireless signal processing and detection techniques with navigation systems, such as Simultaneous Localization and Mapping, to create a comprehensive security solution. Collaborated with an interdisciplinary team to design a user-friendly interface for real-time threat visualization and reporting.
Last updated: [August 2025]